Mmmmmmustard…
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[7.10]
Michaelangelo Matos: Pies flying, trap goin’ ham, open up the store, eating right: it’s a dirty South food fight! But wouldn’t jumping like some hopscotch make you kind of sick after that Thanksgiving-like meal?
[6]
Chuck Eddy: In the great tradition of Tapper Zukie’s “A Message To Pork Eaters,” Jim Jackson’s “I Heard The Voice Of A Porkchop,” the Coasters’ “I’m A Hog For You,” Field Mob’s From The Roota To The Toota, Pigmeat Markham, Onyx (who my son Linus used to think were called “oynx”), and every comedian who ever dodged a pie. Except with space-age synth loops, and Beastie samples.
[8]
Anthony Miccio: For a rapper, Pill makes a great crack dealer. Thankfully, his presence is light enough that the keyb arpeggios and crowd hollers still earn him a spot on Now That’s What I Call TRAP!
[7]
Al Shipley: I like the weird ambiance of the vocal loops providing a constant bed of slightly unnerving background noise. But six years after Trap Muzik basically laid the blueprint for Southern rap for the rest of the decade, I’ve got trap fatigue, and it takes a little more than gritty atmosphere and food puns to make me give a shit about this kind of song anymore.
[4]
Alfred Soto: A cross between Method Man and T.I., this guy has a memorable timbre. What else?
[6]
Alex Macpherson: There’s a huge amount going on in this terrific track: it feels packed with life, hyperactive and hungry, which is brilliantly appropriate for a song seeking to depict quotidian community existence. Staccato strings race up and down the scale as though hunting for an escape; ominous synth horns lurk behind every verse; 808 bass occasionally belches at you. Meanwhile, a disorientating vocal chant rises and falls like a Mexican wave going round your brain. It’s a testament to Pill’s charisma that he not only holds our attention but captivates it; he’s a market seller peddling his wares, rising above the clamour through sheer drive as he bends slang into new shapes and drops lines like, “The trap keep a nigga fresher than a peppermint / White house got me a pocket full of presidents.”
[9]
Martin Skidmore: Dirty South hip hop with a pizzicato violin sample that I really like, over some fuzzily strong beats. I like Pill too, drawling his rhymes with style and attitude, though it could use a vocal hook as memorable as the plinking strings. I have no idea what he is on about, but I suspect he is not trying to communicate with 50-year-old Englishmen.
[7]
Anthony Easton: I like how fast his flow is, and how it tells small regional stories.
[7]
John Seroff: Pill’s self assured, braggadocio, monster-movie flow is perfectly spat over the menacing Burn One hook: sharply plucked strings and portentous brass rippling shockwaves through an endless, undulating B-Boy groan. Fans of Crime Mob, Triple Six and Clipse will find plenty to love on the excellent (and free!) mix, but on the strength of “Ham” alone, Pill makes a strong case for the Rookie of the Year shortlist.
[9]
Jonathan Bradley: Frenetic and bewildering, and that’s before you get to the dense jargon; listeners could indeed be forgiven for finding the talk of yams, flying pies and traps going “ham sanwiches” more opaque than a foreign policy position paper, and twice as surreal. The beat is half plinky Southern junkyard arpeggio and half zombie Beastie Boy lurch (that’s Licensed to Ill‘s “The New Style” moaning away in the background). “Going ham,” as your friendly neighborhood New York Times reviewer can tell you, means going nuts, and “Trap Goin’ Ham” has the bolted-together volatility and off-kilter momentum of a machine on the brink of breakdown. Even Pill’s throaty, rolling flow sounds uncontainable; this is a pot about to boil over.
[8]