Glorious Game

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Ever since his HOT 97 10-minute freestyle rework of Rising Down highlight "75 Bars (Black's Reconstruction)" blew minds in December 2017, Roots’ MC Black Thought has spent a lot of time and energy reasserting his bona fides as a hyper-lyrical powerhouse. But while the skills-recognizing aspect to his revival provides more strong reminders than unexpected epiphanies, he's also been able to better embody the humanistic side of his art along the way. Glorious Game, his collaboration with veteran Brooklyn psychedelic-soul instrumentalists El Michels Affair, embodies this better than anything else to emerge in a strong run that also gave us his Streams of Thought series and his Danger Mouse collab Cheat Codes. You could throw a bit of credit for that to the atmosphere the Affair brings as a backing band: for a certain generation of hip-hop head, their collective ear for funk's stranger, blearier qualities that have been honed from years of RZA reconstructions and retro-cinematic takes on grainy soul-jazz can dredge up some remarkably powerful imagery just on its own. But it's where Black Thought takes these mood pieces, sinking just deep enough into them to absorb a vibe he turns around and commands into vivid life, that makes Glorious Game hit deep. Thought's focused intensity is always good for naturalistic internal rhymes and deeply interlocked referential allusions, but the nuances of his different levels of emotional impact have flourished into his secret weapon as an MC. And the nuanced tone of his more emotionally reflective material—the enduring search for Black joy on "I'm Still Somehow," the sense-memory evocations of a familiar yet often ambivalent nostalgia for a formative time and place on "The Weather," the fight between disillusionment and confidence in "I Would Never"—definitively separates him from your typical lyrics-first rapper. That pays off highest on the album's two most beatific moments: the title cut, where Thought's boasts sound more like self-actualizations than defense mechanisms, and the sobriety-reinvigorated affirmations of closer "Alter Ego," where he takes stock of all the existential questions that drove him to this point and answers them with a clarity that makes even his self-big-ups sound like humble truths. © Nate Patrin/Qobuz