Album Review: Curren$y – Canal Street Confidential
2 min read
Young Money member and Lil Wayne protege Curren$y has skyrocketed to fame through an entirely underground audience, preferring to focus on his incredibly prolific discography rather than success in the mainstream. So his latest album, Canal Street Confidential, comes as a bit of a surprise. This is an album which feels very deliberately engineered for radio play, delivering a lazy, hazy collection of songs which, although not packing any real punch, are still nifty enough to garner favour with fans.
There’s a conspicuous lack of anything too high-octane or boundary-pushing, and although Curren$y is obviously a skilled rapper, his flow and lyrical content aren’t exactly ambitious. The bulk of the album addresses stock-standard rap cliches – women, haters, money, success – without ever delivering anything of any real poignance. There are some interesting moments, such as opener Drive By, which features some haunting instrumentation, or Boulders, a clear nod to Tyler the Creator. But mostly the tracks are unremarkable. Even lead single Bottom of the Bottle, featuring Lil Wayne himself, sees Curren$y repeatedly exclaiming that he wants to “grip her like the bottom of the bottle”, over a pedestrian trap beat and guitar hooks which sound a little too familiar.
Ultimately, the album feels a little lazy, and, above all, forgettable. True, the production is extremely well-executed: slick trap beats are seamlessly overlaid with Curren$y’s raspy, mellow voice to provide some more than satisfactory results. However there’s nothing that really sets this record apart from any other rap album on the market today. Which is a shame, considering the creative potential of Curren$y’s previous work.
