R&B knows no shortage of dirtbag auteurs, but where R. It illuminates the extent to which the mawkish depravity of Ty’s songs feels like an end in itself.
It gets ugly on “Bitches Ain’t Shit”, where Ty$ graces a spectral, druggy production with a yarn about stealing a guy’s girlfriend containing a bridge where he tells the girl “Your nigga laid up in the hospital, and you still think of me/ Man, I swear to God I’d kill your fucking ass if you did that shit to me”. You can snicker at darts like “I took his main bitch away like King Koopa” on “Creez”, but you have to sneak past a minefield of “These hoes be playing games for nothing” and “These bitches ain’t shit” to get there. But his impish lyricism wages a continual warfare with the sweetness of the music, and it occasionally makes for rough listening. All of the outside producers he calls on follow his lead by striking a precarious balance between house music and Southern hip-hop, mostly to dazzling results. The sequel follows on the lead of the original, but where Beach House presented a summation of the artist’s varying talents, Beach House 2 feels like a dry run for the majors, weighted down by a glut of largely ineffectual guest raps, songs recycled from other artists’ mixtapes and remixes of songs that didn’t really need fixing.ĭolla $ign’s arrangements are lush and intriguing on songs like “I Bet”, which matches oceanic synths to subterranean bass in the verses before a wash of keys overtake the mix at every chorus. Ty Dolla $ign’s talents recently landed him a deal with Atlantic Records via Wiz Khalifa’s Taylor Gang imprint, and he celebrated the occasion this month with the release of Beach House 2. “My Cabana” and the accompanying mixtape Beach Housemade up for what they lacked in lyrical depth with dense, immersive production, which slowed EDM’s chunky synths and drops and the sinewy, hyperactive sonics of L.A.’s ratchet music scene down to screw music’s promethazine crawl, and that voice: a syrupy tenor that can contract into taut staccato sing-rap or spread out into drippy vocal runs at a moment’s notice. Los Angeles singer and producer Ty Dolla $ign scored a left-field local hit last year with “My Cabana”, a lightweight ode to women- and the drugs they love- that goofily pondered how many he could fit into his titular cabana.