Fat Trel – Devil We Like

T.I. humming “you can have the devil we like,” get out of my head…

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[6.83]Jonathan Bradley: The creeping synth evokes the dread but Trel makes it claustrophobic: “So many bullets in the clip she skipped out on the lease,” he raps — a boast that disintegrates into despair before it ends. It’s crime music laden with futility rather than bravado: What kind of miserable derangement leads someone to make a threat like “What you taking home with you tonight — your life or your fleece?”? The title could suggest immorality might be emancipatory — Trel does what the devil he likes — but it’s really a statement of affinity. It’s Trel’s blanched realization that hell is home.
[8]

Brad Shoup: I don’t know what the fuck Rich Boy’s doing these days. So I have to turn my eyes from Alabama for moody five-minute rap tracks about making money against the sunset. Boss Major’s track is near-perfect, hanging dread in the air, undercutting it with the occasional cheap-ass Casio strike. Fat Trel’s similarly restrained, repping evil without ever going full goon.
[8]

Iain Mew: The beat sounds like it’s leaking from someone else’s cheap earbuds. I like some of the doomy imagery (“coroners on every corner”!) and the ambiguity about whether Trel likes the devil or is like the devil, but the tinniness is a hell of an obstacle to overcome.
[4]

Jonathan Bogart: Normally a midtempo rap song with a “classy” fake-strings-and-piano backing and self-serious rhymes would be my cue to roll my eyes or worse. Maybe Fat Trel’s buttery flow covers a multitude; maybe it’s the fact that the production isn’t overwrought, just makes space for the extremely well-paced rapping; or maybe  I’m just in a good mood.
[7]

Ramzi Awn: Mix so thick you could drown in it, and the disintegrating strings in the background give the track’s omnipresent danger a sense of pure 2am sadness.  The haze on the production is the perfect hotbox for this joint, punctuated even by the spacebar click at the end.  Black cars that you don’t wanna be in have their summer cut out for them.
[8]

Jer Fairall: Has Wale’s voice and flow so down pat that I had to check the credits to make sure it wasn’t a feature, but this only has the effect of making me miss the Mixtape About Nothing-era Wale’s sense of humour and whip-smart engagement with pop texts even more than I do already. What this has that Ambition-era Wale, about which I will miss absolutely nothing, doesn’t is a sense of gravity to go along with that languorous backing, though this guy’s delivery gives the impression of being nimble enough that I’d be curious to hear him over something a little more lively the next time out.
[6]