B L A C K I E Wilderness of North America
The record opens with the booming “That’s Right,” arguably Wilderness’ strongest track. It’s B L A C K I E in his element: a well-crafted sonic mash-up of samples, synth bleeps and bloops and sporadic drum tracks. This is followed with “Big Big Jokes Jokes,” where Lacour’s Biz Markie vocals unspool a slowed-down rant with lyrics like “I don’t even jam rap / I listen to jazz, man.”
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He speeds up again with “Regrets of an Average African American Amateur Drug Lord.” The album continues on this fast-then-slow trend, but after about track five or six, things start to fade out – including listeners' attention spans. The record trails off in a jumble of uninteresting beats and rambling lyrics.
There’s a solid four or five tracks in this Wilderness, but the rest seem to be afterthoughts, counting too much on spaced-out sounds and distortion. Sure, odd samples – Cat Stevens, ABBA – are great attention-grabbers, and Lacour has the talent and charisma to hold audiences' attention... just not here. His future efforts need to be filled with a non-stop, track-for-track effort that pushes through and doesn’t let go instead of nodding and drifting off into the same outer space his sounds seem to come from. - Dusti Rhodes