Semiratruth is a Chicago-based rapper who confirms herself to be simply one of the dopest producers and MCs in the city on her latest LP I Got Bandz for the Moonlandin'. It begins with a screwed, time-distending mood tracer in the venerated style of Cities Aviv and then shifts into a meditative boom-bap squish and loving squeeze on "Cosmos." Semiratruth produced the first track, while her collaborator Morgan handled the latter, but they flow together as if they were a single cohesive thought.
Moonlandin' is incredible in this regard. It introduces many ideas very quickly but integrates each into an unseemed progression of introspection as rapidly as they are introduced. The transitions sneak up on you too. They aren't telegraphed as you'd expect, but once you've experienced them as they are, it is difficult to imagine the album proceeding in any other fashion.
An example of this is the handoff between the soul-sample backed spiral of "MY GAWD," which a pavement-pounding vignette that urgently depicts, through its hungry lyrics and Semiratruth's adoption of a staccato flow, a very physical sense of alienation and external fixation. This track steadily amplifies in its recurrent intensity only to resolve into the foggy R'nB swivel of "Neva Go, not wit me." wherein Semiratruth finds herself tailing and provoking a fixed locus of obsession while pleading with her own desires in a losing battle with a starved sense of sentimentality.
The exchange between these tracks tells something of a play in two parts: the first act depicts Semiratruth's need for emotional and physical fulfillment, and the second expresses her dissatisfaction and anxiety in the face of what she hopes can be the satisfaction of these essential, human demands. Appetite and apprehension have combined here into a single untamable specimen with indeterminable customs and metabolism.
The Moonlandin' sets successive, meshing, and living musical dioramas in motion but doesn't allow a single episode of the odyssey to dominate its development as a whole. "Neva Go, not wit me." is followed by a hypnogogic interlude that contemplates the nature of art, where after the album jettisons the listener from the ground and into the company of the stars with the cosmic-disco charting shimmer of "Space Crew." It's not a jarring shift by any measure, and the many such transitions that Moonlandin' takes you through are just one of the aspects of what makes the album so spectacular in its compelling unity of form.
Even though Semiratruth doesn't produce every track on the album, the entire procession still has a consistent aesthetic character throughout- that of FM signals cross-pollinating a human consciousness as it attempts to sort the threads of its dreams like the polychromatic squares of a rubrics cube. This level of cohesion is clearly a product of her ability to choose collaborators and communicate her vision to them- a facet of any musical endeavor, hip-hop included, which is the hinge point in determining the success of a project. And Moonlandin' is exceedingly successful. It will steal you away from wherever you are and deliver you into the cool milky stream of Semiratruth cosmic consciousness where you can bask in the luminescent shadow and bathing tides of a celestial body that rises in exultation of the tribe of the moon. It's the truth!
