Ken Carson ‘More Chaos’ Review: A Familiar Second Course

Purposely sloppy however brutally direct in his strategy, Ken Carson pushes rage music to its most sonically excessive type. The 22 songs on the rapper’s fourth studio album, Extra Chaos, aren’t about something within the conventional sense. They’re simply hedonistic flexes of various size, with Carson driving glitchy, shiny, and sometimes poorly combined beats full of deafening, distorted bass. He mutters his signature snicker (“Huh, huh, huh, huh, huh, huh”), delivers a half-slurred, half-mumbled move, and stumbles throughout just a few quotables alongside the way in which.

If this all sounds acquainted, it’s as a result of we’ve been right here earlier than, with 2023’s A Nice Chaos, to be actual. As its title suggests, Extra Chaos is extra of an extension of that undertaking’s sound fairly than a full-fledged sequel, setting itself as much as be thought of minor—and in some ways, it’s.

In case you have been to quantify the expansion between these two albums as a line, it could be practically horizontal. Carson has ever so barely improved as a rapper, if not as a lyricist, although not sufficient to make up for the truth that all the endeavor, even at its most fun, feels repetitive, proper all the way down to the identical drum and hi-hat patterns.

Like A Nice Chaos, the album cranks the smooth clipping to the max, sprinkles in brass and strings, and lets Carson audibly give zero fucks (to the purpose that, when he desires to point out he cares on “Thx,” he proclaims, “For you, I might’ve gave a fuck”). However what was thrilling on the earlier album lacks the identical chunk on Extra Chaos—particularly on the bloated again half, which skimps on memorable moments outdoors of “Ghoul,” the place horror-movie screams are layered into the tune’s demonic beat. On the other finish of the spectrum, the hilariously juvenile “Kryptonite” finds Carson rhyming “dickmatized” with “suicide.”

There’s sufficient strong materials right here to make sure that Extra Chaos isn’t an entire wash, together with a three-track run—“Blakk Rokkstar,” “LiveLeak,” “Diamonds”—that comes absolutely outfitted with diabolically nasty mid-track beat switches. Elsewhere, “Entice Soar” encompasses a triumphantly hard-hitting piano line—courtesy of the normally unreliable Lil 88—that sounds form of evil, with Carson a tad extra locked in than normal. He stalls the monitor’s momentum a bit firstly by repeating “Huh, huh, I’m lettin’ off rounds” 5 instances however makes up for it with a vengeance-fueled verse that imagines a world the place Slick Rick and Ed Hardy are thought of excessive artwork.

However it’s tough to shake that Carson isn’t a very charismatic pressure. Even when he appears to be genuinely making an attempt to spit—as if he has one thing to show, like on nearer “Off the Meter”—the top result’s solely as sturdy as the encompassing components. The monitor marks the primary collaboration between Carson, Playboi Carti, and Destroy Lonely, a second that ought to really feel like a victory lap for the Opium label. As a substitute, Carti’s phoned-in, wannabe-Future efficiency and the dated, 2020-era SoundCloud manufacturing flip it right into a non-event. At this level, one hopes that there’s one thing new on the horizon for Carson apart from Even Extra Chaos.