Album Review: Backxwash - HIS HAPPINESS SHALL COME FIRST EVEN THOUGH WE ARE SUFFERING
Charli XCX’s 2017 mixtape Pop 2 was a career-defining realignment of purpose, bringing with it both a new level of mainstream prestige to the glitchy, futuristic PC Music sound and heightened expectations for the inevitable commercial followup from the newly crowned masthead of hyperpop. But the self-titled album that arrived two years later was hardly a worthwhile successor; Charli was stagnant in its uncanny resemblance to the pop artist’s recent mixtapes, and the unofficial conclusion to the trilogy that began with Number 1 Angel was, if not the weakest of the three, certainly the least innovative. Whatever one’s opinion on the quality of Charli’s oeuvre, that the same issue of déjà vu would crop up again so far from the realm of pop music is surprising, to put it mildly, yet the latest project from experimental artist Backxwash has itself just recreated many of Charli XCX’s least interesting mistakes. Funnily enough, HIS HAPPINESS SHALL COME FIRST EVEN THOUGH WE ARE SUFFERING is also the summation of what may turn out to be a career-defining trio of albums, but while Backxwash’s impressive commitment to the unorthodox supplants many of the shortcomings found on Charli, the fatal flaw of both records sadly persists: a banal form of imitation that infests every musical facet and leaves the results both inferior and indebted to what came before.
HIS HAPPINESS treads upon much of the same thematic and auditory ground as its predecessors, Backxwash’s plaintive regret and anger awash in heavy, horrorcore-adjacent maximalism and a corrupted take on pious grandiosity. Between its penitent chorus and the brilliant interpolation of Mozart’s Requiem, early highlight VIBANDA is a perfect summation of the rapper’s style, even reaching brilliance when the Lacrimosa choir ramps up towards the end of her first verse (“As angel Gabriel holds me/And keeps me close to the heavens/Think ‘This moment is perfect’/Seek the lord for repentance…Will Jehovah respect this/Or clip my rosary necklace?”). Despite its powerfully vulnerable second half, however, the song remains far more laudable for its production than its lyrics, an imbalance that haunts far too much of HIS HAPPINESS. None of her verses are demonstrably bad, yet flubbed rhymes and awkward metaphors pop up regularly to destabilize the listener’s immersion, and on the whole the tenet’s of Backxwash’s writing style have begun to grow stale. While the faux-confessional hooks and half-pious prostrations fit thematically, after two full records of near-identical construction the need for (and continued lack of) variety has become impossible to ignore.
Lyrical themes and dramatically hefty production are not the only elements to recall Backxwash’s previous projects; the resemblance of a cut like NYAMA to the title track of 2021’s I LIE HERE BURIED WITH MY RINGS AND MY DRESSES goes far beyond the superficial. From their structure to their content to their ferocious, unintelligible hooks, the two songs are uncannily similar, and while Kate Davies of Pupil Slicer contributes an admirable chorus to NYAMA, it cannot help but unfavourably echo Ada Rook’s far more emotive and compelling performance. Rapper CENSORED DIALOGUE reappears for another stark series of anecdotes, but where her verse on TERROR PACKETS was a haunting, emotive highlight of I LIE HERE BURIED, ZIGOLO finds her lyrically outclassed by both Sadistik and Backxwash herself, with the song’s cacophonous instrumental again being the standout element. Backxwash’s instincts as a producer rarely steer her wrong, with NFWITI for example standing out as a fully realized refinement of its twin, last year’s 666 IN LUXAXA. Even here, however, the resemblance is not entirely flattering; the inclusion of African percussion, so quickly abandoned by the former in favour of a more recognizable palette, felt like a deliberate choice of style to help the latter stand out among the tracklist of I LIE HERE BURIED, betraying a commitment to aural variety that sadly was one of the few things not replicated on Backxwash’s latest effort.
MULUNGU might on paper seem a relatively unremarkable addition to the album, but a frantic jumble of stuttered vocals and percussion brings a sense of individuality sorely missing across much of its brethren. Backxwash’s short (and somewhat repetitive) verse culminates with some genuine poignance (“And it’s the fear in the eyes of Yahweh/It’s the fear from the skies/It’s the fear every time that I’ll die”) as the track becomes wholly enveloped by its gospel influences, stretching out its sample in a rare moment of musical ingenuity all too infrequent across the rest of the album. Though JUJU returns instantly thereafter to the uniformity of Backxwash’s style, the opportunity to hear Ghais Guevara rap over production this dense and ominous is justification enough in this instance: “He wanna be the man to feed the hood well/Yellow tape where the hood dwells/Unproper farewells/Last words was probably some dumb shit”. Not to be outdone, Backxwash’s verse offers up some of the record’s best one-liners (“I am Luci-her, not Lucifer”, “In the blackface, no Joni Mitchell”), though it’s the interplay between their complimentary hooks that stands out as the most impressive aspect of such a memorable collaboration.
Still, it’s the closer MUZAKI that piques the most interest, a triumphant yet strangely conventional victory lap for an artist whose music is usually straddling the metal genre just as much as it is hip hop. Part of that shock is owed to the ear-catching soul sample, the same one used in Westside Gunn’s Peppas (which was released a mere three days earlier); the two tracks predictably employ the sample in entirely distinct (and equally formidable) ways, but the degrees of separation between Backxwash and boom bap have never been so few. While her lyrics remain nothing to write home about, the sense of finality is appropriately palpable for such a climatic resolution to her three-album parable, and ironically that resolution itself might be the strongest testament to Backxwash’s future as an artist beyond this recent trilogy. Just as Charli XCX (and her self-titled album itself) refused to escape the legacy of Pop 2, HIS HAPPINESS is arguably too beholden to its predecessors to carve out a legacy in its own right, yet if songs like MUZAKI can be seen as evidence of anything, it’s the potential of Backxwash’s artistry to succeed in all the most brutally unique ways one can imagine, if only she herself can manage to realize them.
6.5/10
Favourite Tracks: JUJU, VIBANDA, MUZAKI