Harold Stallworth has a style for every bump in your face.
There’s somber darkness, and then there’s unsettling darkness. For an artist like Curren$y, always malleable to his producers’ creative vision, it spells the difference between sounding like an enlightened stoner or a gumshoe detective. He generally traffics in the former, but his latest single, “Briefcase,” rumored to be the first glimpse of Pilot Talk III, borders on noir. Here, he reunites with Ski Beatz, who produced the bulk of the first two installments of Pilot Talk.
If its deep groove and brooding horns strike a familiar chord, its because it repurposes the same Mysterious Flying Orchestra sample from Trademark Da Skydiver’s pre-Pilot Talk posse cut, “Skyscrapers,” which also featured a hazy verse from Curren$y. It’s a credit to Ski Beatz that this version is much slicker, much glossier, much more sophisticated than Trademark’s album cut from five years earlier. As for Curren$y’s performance, it’s more or less what we’ve come to expect from him over the years: muscle cars, marijuana, and premonitions of disloyalty. No need to fix what’s not broken.
