Album Review: Reason Is Looking For “New Beginnings”
Out October 6, Reason’s New Beginnings is highly soulful which means it will hit you like water in this COVID desert we are living in. People are highly sensitive, for better and worse, but music allows the worse to get better. In 14 tracks, Reason proves that he is a lyrical painter; carrying a literary style in how describes the settings to plots that include betrayal, hope, greed, corruption, love, and dreams.
Reason is such a good rapper because he makes you feel like you have read his work. You see his verses pop before your eyes like a lyric video, and he plants them with emotional seeds that carry through each song as if they are in a “garden continuum.” Tracks like, “Something More,” “Stories I Forgot,” “Window Cry,” and “Extinct” flow together proving no song stands out from the other because each feels like an important chapter to his story. He is a young, black man trying to figure out if power corrupts, than can ambition ever be satisfied? In essence, our ambitions need power to come to fruition, but if power corrupts then is ambition its invitation to do so or they like constantly, hungry energies feeding within us?
REASON – Sauce ft. Vince Staples
Okay, that got really deep. Yet, they are important questions that Reason expands upon with a surprising level of spiritualism. While his beats may slap his choral arrangements and samples make his verses hit even harder. Known for their raw candor, they sucker-punching you with their wit doused with wisdom. First, you are impressed with his flow and distinct voice, then, his verses and messaging, and, overall, his ability to concretize humanism. We are flawed beings carrying satchels of traumas we hope to exchange for sacks of gold; the problem is, in this world, the keepers of the gold got it by taking it from you. From “Fall” to “Gossip,” he speaks to playing societal games that make certain communities, like POCs and women, are destined to lose; yet, we play them in hopes that we can change them but find they change us instead.
