THUMBING THRU FOLIAGE: ALBUM REVIEW
Listening to YUNGMORPHEUS feels like gliding along on a sailboat as the police shoot at you from a distant shore. Everything feels blissful until you start to look around and notice the bullets whizzing by, inches away from your face. But the bullets are always a little too slow to ever take down your little boat. So, even as the world around you consumed in chaos, you can sit back and enjoy the ride. YUNGMORPHEUS’ newest album, Thumbing Thru Foliage, a collaboration with the NYC-based producer ewonee, perfects this complex vibe and YUNGMORPHEUS shows once again why he’s one of the most essential voices in rap.
Rapper YUNGMORPHEUS is on an incredible creative run. It’s the beginning of March, and Thumbing Thru Foliage is already his second full length project this year. Though, considering how comfortably the bars seem to flow from his mind, this incredible rate of output starts to make sense. Ewonee is the perfect partner for MORPH, as his house-influenced beats give the perfect amount of space for YUNGMORPHEUS to work his magic. Songs like “Yakub’s Worst Nightmare” highlight this dynamic as ewonee crafts an incredibly complex and layered beat that has the perfect pockets for YUNGMORPHEUS to showcase a variety of different flows.
The entire album is one big call to action, and YUNGMORPHEUS never hides what he’s about. As he says on “Blaqstar Farms,” “Robin Hood part 2 / Take it ‘till all my niggas rich.” Every bar, every song title, and every instrumental pushes a vision of Black freedom. YUNGMORPHEUS constantly reminds us about how our only goal should be Black liberation, and that he’s willing to get us there by any means necessary. This allows ewonee and MORPH to create an entire self-contained world, governed by their own laws with a clear end goal in sight. As YUNGMORPHEUS says on the album’s final track, “One day i’mma reclaim this fucking black crown.”
Lyrically, Thumbing Thru Foliage is both cryptic and incredibly simple. This can be seen in the way that MORPH talks about beef. There’s no love lost between Morph and any of his enemies. He takes shots at peers, ex-friends, OPPs, and, of course, the police. Most of these shots are pretty direct, like the line, “hit a lick on your uncle and his racist homies.” But within all of these bars, he’s getting at something deeper. He never takes shots solely for the sake of stirring up drama. You can hear the anger in his voice for every “fuck these niggas.” If he is coming at you, it’s because you did him dirty and he’s willing to immortalize that beef on a track.
YUNGMORPHEUS has created and essentially perfected a style that is completely his own. I can’t think of a single other artist who will whisper in your ear about “bumping techno” over a chilled-out piano loop. At its best, Thumbing Thru Foliage immerses you completely in its own world: A world filled with death and danger, but where nothing has the power to touch you. Most importantly, YUNGMORPHEUS makes music that always makes you feel something, and the range of emotions you experience during Thumbing Thru Foliage is incredible. It’s a beautiful project and my favorite album of the year so far.