Balance and composure light we made zip1/23/2024 ![]() You’re right to roll your eyes at silly song titles, formulaic tapping, and uninspired singing, but at the same time, you gotta hand it to ‘em when people in this genre do something right, and Easy Beach’s self-titled record is emo done right. To some degree, people are right to groan about emo music. billy woods can fit a whole world into a record, and it’s a blessing that we get to watch it spin. While the vastness of woods’ pen game on Maps is pretty sublime, some of his most striking moments are when he gets down to the small-scale specificities, particularly on the record’s back half– “ NYC Tapwater” is the bittersweet comedown from life on tour, the comforts of his home city are inextricable from the past traumas it bears witness to and constantly under the threat of being paved over by the continuous march of gentrification on “ As The Crow Flies,” the homecoming narrative concludes with a scene of woods and his son, a reckoning with the responsibilities of fatherhood and the tandem joys and fears that come with it (“I’m at the park with the baby on the swings / When it hits me crazy, anything at all could happen to him”). “ Year Zero” pulls back the spatial and temporal lens even further, chronicling the dawn of man to the decay of the present in just a few bars (“Apes stood and walked into the future / March of progress end hunchbacked in front the computer / Sooner or later it’s gon’ be two unrelated active shooters / Same place, same time, great minds”). “ Babylon By Bus” rolls out personal and world history on one long, non-linear timeline, deftly hopping from the 2011 NBA Championship to the Russian Revolution to 9/11 to the passing of woods’ grandmother. ![]() In the same track, woods’ trip to California isn’t a vacation– it’s a chance to convene with the past, complete with lyrical dues paid to both LL Cool J and the Black Panther Party. “ No Reservations, walked in like Bourdain,” he boasts on “ The Layover,” shouting out the late celebrity chef and documentarian and nodding to how both Bourdain and woods himself view travel as an immersive practice. ![]() Part-travel diary, part-anthropological exploration, Maps just might be woods’s most accessible yet ambitious work to date. To describe billy woods’s quasi-concept album as “all over the place” might initially come off as an insult, but I mean it in the most complimentary and, on some levels, literal way possible.
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