Vince Staples - "Loca"
Vince Staples - "Lemme Know"

Summertime '06 is called what it's called and it came out last June, but really it's an album for the sharpest corners of winter, the way it keeps lacing the spring's slow approach, even when the light starts to change over for real. Cold splintered in the wind like stray glass, all kinds of whisper and drift in the air. Staples raps with this clenched-teeth diamond-throated supernatural jittering leanness, a calm that's half a molecule away from total chaos in every syllable. An object lesson in how stillness and frenzy aren't anything as simple as opposites. His anxiety, all through these songs, all through this album, is so pervasive that every other impulse starts and ends inside of it. You can hear it in the background even when he's pausing, in the echoes that skitter across each song, you can hear it when you're walking home with your headphones in at night along an empty street in a cold that wants to claim you even as it's beginning to dissolve. Sexy in how bad it wants to teach you a lesson or grasps to be taught one, sexy in its stainless steel, its strobing. Staples can't rap over a beat if it doesn't sound like a stuttering heart. He can't ask if you wanna fuck without checking to see if you're down to die in the same steady, gasping breath.

[buy Summertime '06]