Review Summary: The concepts of reality and virtuality are very vague to me. I'm sorry. I'm Trinity. Emotional stimulation software.
The city is asleep. Or so it seems. Stooges run while rain blurs the city skyline. A dead person lies on the ground, blood's crimson splashing the sad grey covering the macadam. In these mean streets, you no longer try to fill your vices: you want to feel, more than anything else. Feel, no matter the means nor the risks, even if it means breaking the laws of a disenchanted world where money chomps rotten hearts. Feel alive, loved and in pain, in search of sensations that until then seemed to no longer exist. Welcome to the world of Trinity.
With his records, the goal of French rapper Laylow is to tackle these emotional issues. At first bedeviled by his love, the Toulouse native confessed his feelings to the one he held dear - without any positive response - in his 2016 mixtape,
Digitalova, to then show his pain and suffering on
.RAW and his dehumanization on
.RAW-Z. Having always put forward these feelings, Laylow pushes the concept of his past projects to 11. His work finds its culmination in
Trinity, an album that could be likened to an audio film exploring his anxieties and sorrows in a fictional world reminiscent of science-fiction dystopias.
Like every good sci-fi tale, a technological invention must be at the center of the world created. Here, Trinity is an emotion software alleviating a world that is empty, cold and artificial and where humans no longer feel anything. Thanks to this software, we can navigate through Laylow's brains, heart and different emotions. Arrogance and insensitivity are dealt with in "HILLZ", passion is deciphered in "PLUG" while "PIRANHA BABY" testifies to the rapper’s anger and violence. These different emotions make him go out of his mind until, finally, he feels the most destructive feeling: pain. Encountering a young woman he associates with Trinity, all his extreme emotions prevent him from truly loving another being, her departure being officialized during the penultimate track “MILLION FLOWERZ”. Representing both the woman he is not able to love and the software that can help him regain certain emotions, Trinity is both Laylow's savior and executioner.
This way of using future technology to talk about present problems is, admittedly, nothing new. Films such as
Matrix or
Her have already dealt with these matters. More generally, many dystopian sci-fi works depicted a world where people tried to find a way to escape from reality. Nevertheless, Laylow manages to bring his personal knack to these well-known themes. The first and most important of these contributions is the fact that he has compiled this story into a French rap album, which is something that has hardly been done before, if ever at all. In addition, a lot of work has been done to make all the aesthetic aspects of the album consistent with the plot.
To best tell this cold story, Laylow chooses to focus only on digital and mechanical beats that add tension and stick to the theme. Ultra-modern in its soundscape, the production is ultimately at the service of the story being told. Influenced by Travis Scott or Lunice to name but a few, the beatmaker Dioscures manages to create productions as electronic and icy as the world described by the rapper. Likewise, this choice is reflected in the treatment of the rapper's voice: sometimes autotuned to demonstrate the inevitable impact of technology on our world, and sometimes in the background to show the ineluctability of said technology. Laylow sounds like a cyborg, still human enough to feel, but too robotized by being trapped under the belly of this horrible machine. His rendering is also dedicated to the plot: he knows how to convey emotions and does not hesitate to try different accents to portray several protagonists. The track "…DE BATARD" features no less than four different characters, of which three are performed by Laylow himself. He also varies his flows and singing styles, testifying to his modern approach to French rap. Knowing very well he does not have the best voice nor the best melodies, the rapper tries to be as creative as possible in the way he delivers words.
However, this creativity is not without limits, as Laylow builds a patchwork of influences to serve his concept. These identifiable influences make for one of the record's defects: one can't help but recall other rappers' flow while listening to the album - Booba or Maes for the French rap influence, Travis Scott for the American one. Although original, Laylow is not yet completely unique as his influences may not be sufficiently digested for his flows to totally sound like his own. Another problem is inherent to the album concept: since he wants to wrap up his brainchild into a record, some tracks are more interesting for what they bring to the storyline than for their own musical qualities ("NAKRé" and “PLUG” come to mind). This makes for an overlong last third of a dense record, which might deter impatient listeners, or y’all non-French speakers. Even though these flaws come to mind every time one listen to the album, this is one of the most ambitious projects of modern French rap, proving once again the new generation's will to rival the 90s golden age. Although its particular style will not resonate with everyone, this is a dense album that reveals itself over the course of multiple listens, the audio film proposed here making sense through interludes and other digital sound effects which reinforce the listener's immersion. Despite everything not being perfect, we can only rejoice to see artists innovating in a scene approaching saturation, French rap being currently overwhelmed by countless albums. Blinded by the mirages of technology, but still trying to hold on to his own feelings, Laylow has released perhaps not one of the best French rap albums of 2020, but certainly one of the most interesting ones.
