Mr. Steal Your Mrs…
[Video]
[5.50]
Will Adams: “Your Mrs” sports lots of appeal even just in its title hook and the meme-ready follow-up “nah brudda I’m joking.” But the interest fades quickly (only teased in the final thirty seconds with some unexpected vocal modulation), and the piano-based beat is too sparse to keep things moving.
[5]
Ian Mathers: The production is sparsely foreboding enough (GREAT piano near the end, especially) and Jay1’s delivery is sure enough (in both the ‘-footed’ and ‘of itself’ senses) that it’s a bit of a shame the subject matter wasn’t more fitted to the surroundings, or at least a bit more atypical. Still, I bet this sounds awesome driving around a city late at night.
[7]
Will Rivitz: His flow is that of a less charismatic Stormzy, a critique over most other beats but praise over this one, its piano so spare and barren that only the most scowlingly imperturbed of life forms can thrive on its alien surface. Jay1 waxes poetic about fire parties; I can’t for the life of me imagine the song’s frigidity inspiring anything particularly energetic. That’s a compliment.
[7]
Scott Mildenhall: “Balling like Inter” — is this 2009? Will Jay1’s next release be based on a Balotelli meme? Maybe not, but “Your Mrs” has all the invention of that, and what seems almost like pride at being derivative. All that’s memorable are the clanging, route-one references common to a thousand eager upstarts with little to say other than that they too have heard of Bugzy Malone and “Gun Lean”. If Coventry have sent Jay1 to succeed The Enemy, he’ll need to work harder. Slightly harder.
[4]
Julian Axelrod: Rappers have been bragging about stealing each other’s girls for millennia, long before cuckolding infected the public consciousness. So Jay1 isn’t breaking any new ground here, even if his cheeky hopscotch flow has grit beneath its grin. But things get interesting around the second chorus, when the beat flowers out from a simple piano stomp into a vivid, meditative noir tableau. It keeps things from feeling one-note by… adding more notes.
[6]
Thomas Inskeep: British hip hop too minimalist for its own good, not helped by the fact that Jay1’s lyrics are pretty damn dull. This is background music.
[4]