Leikeli47 may wear a mask, She has a stronger sense of self than many artists who block their eyes wherever they find space. He’s a child of hip-hop and waltz social scene whose benchmark bath contains music visuals for JAY-Z and Lauryn Hill, dresses for America’s Next Top Model manager J. Alex; She lets her song talk for itself, but injects it with enough autobiographical information to face through. As a Black girl living in Brooklyn, Leikeli’s product of secrecy awards her song a personal and collective faith and it stretches throughout her four studio albums, most marketed after Black beauty treatments: 2017 Wash & Set, 2018 Acrylic, and her latest project, Shape Up.
Structurally, Shape Up isn’t further removed from the percussion of Acrylic. Both songs spin inside a flashing beat and it deserves that much waltz and electronica like they do hip-hop, and both finally panned to soulful tunes and songs. The key difference between The two is The absence of a plotline with The exception of Acrylic, Shape Up has no parodies or world-building practices. A great remake, the new album increases which collaborated before, simplifying an established method without tinkering too much. Leikeli’s bravado seems to be slightly fuller, the bond between her stories is a little deeper. She begins the second passage of a poem “Secret Service” with a rowdy episode of her and a little of that companion jamming JAY-Z music while traveling a vehicle along the Potomac River, but you can experience the woofer shaking the frame. Scenes like these record Shape Up like another glimpse inside her self, but it’s also a surprisingly interesting rap album on its own.
Leikeli’s functionality goes a long way to staying up to date. In default mode, she blends gallant pun croons and gimme-what’ s-mine showcased informed with painting information. On “New Money” she ends up with a harsh killed at an ex-sex ( “My ex called me trying to talk again/But I don’t negotiate with terrorists”) and explains the Nike underwear scrunched up in her Jimmy Choos before the finale with a nicely chanted angle and it remembers the beginning song of Beyoncé’s The Edge “Formation of”: “I want every single quarter, penny, nickel, and dime! /You ain’t gonna mail my check nigga; I’m outside.” “New Money” implodes all her skills to disorienting the, but they’re equally interesting when they express separately in the moves of the percussion narrative, and it mutates into an action-packed stomp-out on the road “Zoom”; for information like the “Assalaamu alaykom” It accompanies a whirlwind romance with an associate on a lonely island “Cool J, LL & J” (shortened for “Ladies Love Cool Jewelry!”); in the zig-zagging distribution of the waltz episode she evokes on “Jay Walk.” Leikeli’s words are dreamlike, her sense of place increasing the lively producer.
The scene-setting is almost as fascinating as she shifts away from pure rapper. Leikeli enjoys a surreal mid-album shift, almost as though he’s flashing your sound to ensure you’ re paying attention. On Shape Up that’s a three-song reach where she tells a ceased romance over Temptations-style doo-wop ( “Free to Love”), proclaims pro-Black passages over a house-raised rhythm ( “BITM”), and provides a bubbling R & B house song ( “Baseball”). It’s a roller coaster of rhythm and mood changes, one that features the sentimental and melodic difficulty of Black women in stronger words in comparison with the conceptual framework of Wash & Set and Acrylic. The truth, anxiety, and ultimate precision of Love “Free to Love” Specifics, offer its narrative a similar self and universal appeal.
Concept or no idea, Leikeli47 takes pride in using the comfort features of hip-hop, Home> General>, and R & B to repeatedly soundtrack her narrative. Her music collides with bright faith and fresh insecurity, unimpressed with how they scrape up against each other. In the last five years Leikeli hasn’t drifted far from her melodic comfort zone, and Shape Up doesn’t attempt to fix which isn’t split. But the regulation she generates over her narrative guarantees around that new album feels like an intro.
