Armani Caesar — The Liz

Second studio album for Armani Caesar, the first since the Buffalo rapper joined Griselda Records in March 2020. The beats are provided by JR Swiftz, DJ Premier, Animoss, Camoflauge Monk, Elijah Hooks, Denny LaFlare, Bone8 and Stlndrms. The guests are Westside Gunn, Conway the Machine, Benny the Butcher, and 808 Mafia.

I would start with the cover: homage to Liz Taylor, with black skin and third eye of "Hitler Wears Hermes VI", to strengthen a Griselda identity, while the back cover is equally important, because it portrays Miss Elizabeth's photo and features a tribute to DJ Shay. The album comes out a month after the originally scheduled date, precisely due to the death of the producer, Armani's mentor, who had joined the Griselda family over the previous years, collaborating on many projects and who had discovered Armani as a rapper ten years earlier.

The opportunity for the girl arrives in autumn 2020 and she does everything to not disappoint expectations: this feeling is felt right from the start, where, despite the skit from the movie "CB4" (1993) for the intro with which Armani wants to show her mentality and therefore what the program of the following ten tracks will be, she seems to have put the autopilot, going slowly without wanting to risk anything. She's not doing badly, but it's evident that she's holding back, at least in the choice of the style of delivery, slow, calm, not too velvety, and even too calm for such violent and raw lines. The rhythms don't help, because they aren't at the level of quality you would expect from a Griselda record, they aren't at THAT level: no one misses his beat, but in the first half of the record, Armani never sinks the shot, she never makes the track her own, she doesn't kill the songs, she almost limits herself to strolling while spreading her lyrical drive-bys.

The rhythms of JR Swiftz, Denny LaFlare and Camoflauge Monk respectively are quite honest, jazzy boom bap with slow drums and good samples, but the rapper fails to take advantage of the sound carpets by delivering without energy ("Countdown") or in a monotonous and weak way on a perfect drum and dark vibes ("The Liz"). It's also weak in the third cut, where the scene is taken by a Westside Gunn lame hook. The tape begins to show signs of recovery with Conway the Machine featuring in "Gucci Casket": decent jazzy rhythm, not excellent, made by JR Swiftz, tight looped sample, monotonous Armani delivery, while Conway is doing pretty well and returns some vitality to the project. The central part quickly becomes the more solid section, thanks to two good tracks with Benny the Butcher: even when the MC pulls out sex stanzas, he always manages to look icy, cold and shiny thanks to a couple of almost random bars but well-placed within his metric schemes, easily managing to steal the show. Elijah Hooks is credited with producing "Drill a RaMA", an energetic trap rhythm on which Benny & Armani deliver back and forth, then DJ Premier himself makes the beat of "Simply Done", arguably the best cut of the tape, open from his classic scratches, entrancing sample from Queen Latifah and jazzy boom bap with practically perfect drum. His production has an almost mafia mood that adapts to Armani's delivery, finally rhythmic, and to that of Benny who... forget about it, he plays another league.

In the final part of this album, the sexual cuts arrive, insidious and predictable: it's something you always have to expect at some point on an album by a commercial female hip-hop artist — and this is meant to be a commercial record — hoping that there are as few as possible. Here they're present at joint number eight and the skit of the next one, they're short songs, but not enough if you're intolerant to this kind of tracks. "Palm Angels" strives to be pop with a glossy jazzy light rhythm, with the rapper's effortless hook and delivery, they close a quite anonymous production of Stlndrms and a freestyle outro with good male soul sample and sax sample.

The album, 26 minutes divided into 11 short songs, is a female mafia record, entirely braggadocio, with some lines more criminal and some more vicious ones. It ends up being a halfway record: it's clearly inspired by Lil' Kim and Foxy Brown, the two pioneers of the dirty-mafia rap genre, but she doesn't follow either path. Take the intros: while Kim debuted with one of the most sexual skits in the history of hip-hop music up to that moment, showing off that would have been the prelude to her debut album and making a cover that will also be snapped up in prisons, Foxy appeared to have made an immortal blood pact with The Firm. While Kim mirrored the boss's lover image, Foxy mirrored the boss's young wife image. Armani looks almost in the middle, with a greater personality she might mirror the one who take advantage of the boss, but maybe it's still too early for that.

It's an interesting start, the lyrics are more or less what you'd expect from a gangsta / mafioso rap record, with a more confident rapping style and better rhythms — these leave something to be desired for most of these twenty-six minutes — she could make a solid record.

Rating: 6.5/10.