Max Bell keeps it…
When Kanye calls, you keep quiet. (All collaborators undoubtedly sign non-disclosure agreements—Kim is occasionally exempt.) When you wind up on a song like “All Day,” you’re probably four and half seconds from wiling in the worst way: Granting numerous features to waning rappers clamoring for relevance, releasing all B-sides under the guise of a mixtape, signing away your artistic sovereignty for sartorial advice from a walking wide-brimmed hat (see said anthropomorphism here, here, and here). “Keep It Easy,” Allan Kingdom’s first solo effort post-flamethrowers is how you flex, how you move when the silence turns to phone calls, e-mails, and DMs, well, all day.
Released gratis via SoundCloud, “Keep It Easy” is all snarling swagger. As Kingdom packs Phillies with his affiliates, former friends and foes move across frozen Minnesota waters with ephemeral handshakes, head nods and mixtapes. He doesn’t trip. They aren’t worth his shade. He has their women; he doesn’t have to remind you that he has Kanye’s phone number. You hear the confidence at every turn, but you also hear the eccentricity. It’s there in the ethereal, low-end heavy trap suite, there in the cooing, half-pronounced “easy” at the end of the hook.
Kingdom’s last project, Future Memoirs, is probably Minneapolis’s answer to A Kid Name Cudi–Plain Pat, what up—but his rapping has long surpassed that of Cleveland’s proto sadboy. Here he tempers quasi-croons with one fluid and deftly rapped boast after the next. Comparisons to Chance the Rapper were low hanging fruit for complicated content providers months ago, but Chance has never sounded this menacing. If Kingdom doesn’t move to L.A., he might keep the fire
