I feel weirdly fated to review this album by Nowaah The Flood...* even if it's a strange place to start in the artist's catalog. Right Over Left 2 (Square Business) is a sequel to a 2021 project that also formed as a collaboration with British producer Giallo Point. For those not in the know, "Right Over Left" means to remain steadfast, resolute even, to not give up your space (your square), and to stand on your business. The album is as dirty and durable as its forebearer while justifying a return to well-trodden turf by reaching even farther back in time with its beats to evoke a certain ragtime aspect that feels haunted by its own alienated emergence- a splintered disclosure of gnarled ancestry and sound that clobbers and smashes the bright illuminations of funk and psyche-soul which gifted a tarnished luster to Right Over Left 1, before sweeping up the shards and grinding them into a sinister sepiatone glaze which Nowaah drools and spits like a cobra thawing out of a deep artic freeze, now rising hungry and ready to deal out just deserts. Nowaah's flow is deceptively forceful in its swift dispatch- taking cues from '90s mainstays like Ghostface and Nas; he tends to toss off rhymes like sideswiping blows, catching you off guard with how much dust he can beat out of the scenery before the whole joint feels ready to come crashing down around your ears. More enticing than his style or its accompaniments is Nowaah's general posturing, a knowingly cultivated crosssection of provocation and sermon deployed with a fixed aim as if attempting to conjure a lost spirit with his words or claw to the surface the seeds of some shrowded wisdom once erroneously abandoned. Holding ground for these bluntly eloquent excavations is undoubtedly in line with the subject matter prompted by the album's title. It leads one to ponder whether he's achieved all that he set out to here or if he will soon embark on yet a third expedition of aural archeology in due time.
