Review: Yonas, ‘The Transition’
posted in: Music News • Pop • Urban
Last night, at midnight, Yonas dropped his latest album, The Transition (Deluxe Edition). It’s a fantastic effort, bringing a much needed depth to today’s pop music scene, and Yonas is at the top of his game.
The Transition is as much a singer-songwriter album as a pop or hip-hop album. It is lyrically introspective and confessional in a way that many of Yonas’ leading contemporaries have flirted with but not achieved. He resists a lot of the distracting, one-dimensional ego tripping that plays so exhaustingly trite on pop radio’s hit singles. Instead, Yonas speaks honestly about his background, his art, his dreams, and most thoroughly, his struggle with the world. Does this all include some healthy self-aggrandizement? Sure it does, because that’s a true and universal part of the human experience. To eschew that part of himself would be dishonest and thus not in keeping with the tone of The Transition.
And that tone is both real and dark. The album kicks off with “Set It Off,” which is both a mission statement and a harbinger of the stormy record ahead. Yonas is ready for whatever comes: “The heat is over, it’s cold now / The people coming for your soul now / Everybody ’round me got a gun / You’d be stupid as a motherfucker walkin’ round without one.” Is he being literal? Is it a comment on the reality of urban life? It doesn’t matter, because we get the sense of the dangers, both apparent and hidden, that are seemingly innate to the world. “Have you ever felt like you’re wrong even when you’re dead right? / Cause everyone else [who was] dead right end up dead when they pull up at a red light,” he muses, before invoking JFK, Malcolm X, Tupac, and MLK.
Elsewhere, Yonas battles an internal storm. “I know what I’m supposed to be / I know what I’m supposed to feel / But I just don’t know how” goes the hook on “What More Can I Say?” And external forces still threaten: “You see I’m searching for better / Cause my niggas still walkin’ with weapons under their sweaters… And if everybody dies but not everybody lives / I’m trying to see this world for what it is.” But here we come back to a recurring theme of the record. Yonas is realistic, self-controlled, and always prepared to rise above: “Count on me to be superior, periodically.”
It’s the overarching description of this battle between what can be controlled and what cannot that makes this such a powerful artistic statement. For however difficult the circumstances, if we remain self-possessed and keep trying to overcome, we have a chance to survive the worst. In a way, Yonas has given us a 21st century update on the old serenity prayer: “God, grant me the serenity to accept the things I cannot change, the courage to change the things I can, and wisdom to know the difference.”
For Yonas, the fight is always ongoing. Even on the brag, there’s a dark side. In “What More Can I Say,” he boasts, “My flow’s so sick it’s forever under the weather.” A clever line, obviously, but representative of a fatigue with the struggle. On the album’s title track, we find a similar yin/yang, this time a prayer in Yonas’ own words: “Dear Lord / Let me back in / I’m killin’ rappers / I know that’s a sin / But I can’t help it / It’s in my nature / I’m a cool motherfucker but chill / Cause I got something tucked in my blazer.” Again, a little tongue-in-cheek on the surface, but Yonas is describing his lot – doing what he does, what he was made to do, all he can do in the face of an oppositional world, which keeps coming at him. “The pressure’s on me / Yeah, I feel it more than ever / But I still hold it down.” In response, Yonas goes back and back again, defiantly, to his core, the music: “Nevermind, we still here and we turn / The music to a massive movement / They gon’ have to assassinate us / Cause that is the last solution.”
“Roller Coaster” bears a simple simile that encapsulates the album and crystalizes The Transition‘s moment in time. The idea of life being full of ups and downs, like a roller coaster, is not a new one, but it’s a sturdy platform on which Yonas (as well as guests Moosh and Twist of OCD) can take a pause, pondering both the personal and the universal, ceasing for a moment the struggle, and letting the pain of both wash over.
Other songs on The Transition are more specific, but stick with a uniquely introspective voice. Instead of conquest-enumerating ‘love’ songs, Yonas delivers “Lost Me,” a lament that evenly depicts the dissolve of a relationship in the complex terms that it deserves. This is no good riddance kiss-off, but an examination of the good and bad and what might have gone wrong. Even in this, though, Yonas can’t help but see the bigger picture, asking, “How many girls out there you know mistreated but stay with that dude? / How many dudes out there you know repeating what they only knew? / Vicious circle in life but I’m just trying to make it right / Have you fallen deep in a love and have you fallen to it twice?”
On top of it all, The Transition sounds great. The production is high-level, the beats unobtrusive, the hooks and flow melodic and memorable. Yonas’ vocals are tight and cut to an edge – listen to the restrained yet overdriven grit with which the lead on “My City” is mixed. The roomy instrumentation is never too little and never too much. Clean pianos, winding synth lines, pads and hits all compliment the vocal rather than compete for attention.
At 17 tracks, there is a lot to take in on The Transition (Deluxe Edition). This is an album we can come back to repeatedly and get something new each time. We recommend you do the same.
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