Revival Season – Golden Age of Self Snitching review

Killer Mike knew it.

“Look at all these slave masters posin’ on yo dollar” he spat on JU$T, a song about street experiences being voyeuristically explored and culturally appropriated for the big bucks. That was a track from RTJ4, released in the feverish, post-Floyd era in which self initiated change could maybe come – four years later, not much has happened.

It’s a recurring theme and the basis which gives Revival Season’s debut album Golden Age of Self Snitching it’s title, one embodied best on Everybody (‘Every muthafucka want a bad assed bitch/Every mothafucka got a mix tape out’) which describes this race to the bottom where none of the participants win.

Natural justice and the church don’t mix well either, but that’s where Brandon ‘BEZ’ (B Easy) Evans and beatmaker/producer Jonah Swilley cut their teeth in Georgia, growing up with the likes of Outkast and CeeLo as rap role models.

Golden Age of Self-Snitching is a sort of audio ballistics test, with ideas, samples, forms and lyrics all ricocheting off each other at a thousand miles an hour. Equally deliberate as it is chaotic, Barry White explores opioid abuse and Love To See flanks a voyeuristic media, but it’s on Pump – which sounds not unlike Run The Jewels on a chilled Sunday afternoon – that the duo head towards an overground which they want to embrace only on their own terms.

You can read a full review here.