G-Eazy
When It's Dark Out
Release Date: Dec 4, 2015
Genre(s): Rap, Alternative Rap, West Coast Rap
Record label: RCA
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Album Review: When It's Dark Out by G-Eazy
Very Good, Based on 3 Critics
Based on rating 8/10
Sex, drugs, and rock & roll. And rap. On G-Eazy's second LP, When It's Dark Out, the self-made Young Gerald oozes confidence on a nocturnal journey of hedonistic rhymes set to the wooziest of productions. He spits about what he knows: gratification, how to attain it, and the energy expended in the process.
Based on rating 6.7/10
It's easy to write G-Eazy off as a Macklemore that simply grew up further south: He's a white indie rapper from the Bay Area who has built a sizable fan base producing the same kind of sober wordplay, one that carefully articulates individual syllables and slots them into grooves, expressing thoughts in straight lines. Each artist has taken each painstaking step to address his whiteness (and subsequently how that makes them outliers and commodities all at once) and they both present themselves as very for the culture, a phrase which here means aligned with conservative rap values and in tune with hip-hop culture's history and innermost workings. But upon closer examination, G-Eazy isn't much like Macklemore at all; in fact, he's more like Bizarro Macklemore, a self-serious, self-absorbed swag rapper who shuns the thrifty for the bourgeois.
Based on rating 3/5
American rapper Gerald Earl Gillum – currently heard on House of Fraser’s Christmas TV ad – follows up last year’s US top 3 major-label debut These Things Happen with a second album that could’ve hit a home run if it hadn’t worked so hard to cover all the bases. G-Eazy’s bravura take on Dylan Thomas’s Do Not Go Gentle Into That Good Night for Intro, Bebe Rexha’s killer vocal hook on Me Myself & I, and One Of Them’s heady dose of materialist ennui – “I see that Lambo I need one of them... see normal people I’m not one of them” – threaten to corner the Macklemore/Drake crossover market.
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