“Skate on the demo like Vladimir Tarasenko/ Need a ballerina to tweak like Valentina Shevchenko”, haunts Gabe Nandez over a crime jazz beat produced by Preservation to open Bascinet, easily one of the best rap records of the year.
Gabe Nandez delivers proverbs, axioms, with hypnotizing flashes of introcate multisyllabic rhymes. “Stacking my medals like Legos from scores I settle/ Sit and watch the peasants settle for pebbles, get on my level”
Yip-toeing through desert streets, dispensing gems and codes to the locals—truths hidden by their ruler. “The court jester demanded a raise, poor fool/ Didn’t understand you was branded a slave, old school”
Preservation providing piano progressions—soundtracking the mysterious messiah, before the beat switches, almost as if to sound the city alarm, time for Gabe Nandez slick talk as he flees the scene.
“Silver carats and gold nuggets/ Light-skinned in warm weather but cold blooded“, Gabe brags as Bascinet becomes a laid-back escape from bamboo-barred prison, as Gabe, tooth-pick in mouth, swagger on 100, raps about paying for sex.
Bascinet perfectly encapsulates the vibe of Sortilège—the collab album between rapper Gabe Nandez—bountifully replenished beneath the MF DOOM learning tree, clearly—and producer Preserveration—an underground legend, probably best known as Dr. Yen Lo, producer for KA (RIP)—another rapper Nandez draws his inspiration, clearly.
Gabe Nandez spends this project oscilating back and forth between a confident, street-wise vet like Roc Marciano—dropping temple taps and “oh, shit!’s” with fly wordplay, and vulnerable, confessionals like Spire, where Gabe admits he’s a trick,saying, “Got a thing for hoes, I definitely got a problem/ Very little clothes in public, she going shopping, She treat the shop owner like shit, she so obnoxious/ She treat your boy like a option, I watch her body rocking” —or on Ball and Chain, where Gabe describes his drug addtion: “Before it harms you it heals you, you feelin’ strong about it/ Until it starves you, it feeds you, you put your arms around it”
Nandez reveals world secrets, spitting game from lived experience, paired with the gravity of his baritone voice, internal rhyme schemes and cat burglar finesse over these beats Preservation laced with the sounds of Shaolins from Hymalayan monasteries and State Island basements.
You’re listening to the culmination of catharsis, skill, technique, teaming up with Preservation, a master of the craft, capable of expansive world-building in just 39 minutes of music.
Preservation and Gabe Nandez’s synchronicity flows throughout, including the track Nom De Guerre with French trap rapper, Ze Nkoma Mpaga Ni Ngoko. Very SEO friendly moniker.
Preservation loops these old, fuzzy boom bap drums, Gabe woven into the seams, bouncing in and out with his French partner in crime.
Sortilège is an achievement—an advancement of the underground hip hop world that birthed us. MF DOOM and Ka live forever as long as the vanguards continue to pay homage and further the cause, introducing top-tier lyracism and experimental beat production to a new generation of sickos like me.
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