Album Review: Pusha T - King Push - Darkest Before Dawn: The Prelude

Two years later, I still stand by my decision to name Pusha T’s My Name is My Name as my favorite album of 2013. So when an artist like that announces he’ll be releasing a new album within two weeks of the closing of the year, if you’re like me, you preemptively clear a spot near the top of your ‘best of’ list and wait with anticipation.

Now, I’m to saying that Pusha T’s Darkest Before Dawn is a bad album—far from it. It, for the most part, is a great album, and in any year, we should be so lucky to have an album released by an artist of his caliber. But a few listens through, I’m just beginning second guess my eagerness to dub an album I hadn’t heard as one of the ‘best’ of the year.

Serving as a self-described “prelude” to next year’s King Push, Darkest Before Dawn is, at its heart, a bit of an odds and ends collection. It’s material recorded in sessions for King Push, but it was material deemed too dark sounding to fit into that album’s aesthetic; so rather than house it away in a vault somewhere, the ten most “linear, cold, and dark” joints, as he put it, have been assembled here.

In a sense, it’s like Pusha T’s own Kid A and Amnesiac.

Linear, cold, and dark are the three best words to musically and lyrically describe Darkest Before Dawn. Push has always worked best within a dark sounding aesthetic, and here, in many instances, there’s no light at all. Pitch black and claustrophobic is the vibe, and when it works well, it is unrelenting—beginning with the hard hitting intro track that slides right into the collection’s first single, the Notorious B.I.G. sampling, spooky sounding “Untouchable.”

Spread across the album’s ten short tracks, it works the best when it’s hook driven and focused—The-Dream lends his voice to the catchy, skittering refrain of “More Famous Than Rich”; and even the sophomoric humor of  “Money, Pussy, Alcohol,” is easy to look beyond simply because of its charming piano sample and restrained sounding hook sung by A$AP Rocky and Kanye West, of all people.

The album’s closing track, “Sunshine,” the haunted elegy featuring Jill Scott is also one of the effort’s strongest, albeit, shorter tracks—and there lies one of the other problems with Darkest Before Dawn.

In an interview with Jayson Greene, Pusha T scoffs at the idea that the album is a “mixtape.” “I don’t want to cheapen it like that,” he tells Greene before the interview has even started. Despite Pusha’s need for this project to be taken seriously, its rushed delivery, short length, and overall mixed bag approach does lend itself to being more of a mixtape rather than a legit album. Whatever you want to call it—parts of it feel unfinished, or at least, feel underdeveloped at times.

Even with that criticism, Darkest Before Dawn is a good album, however, it is also far from perfect—and that’s when linear, cold, and dark becomes head scratching, like the frenetic, off kilter Timbaland produced “Got ‘Em Covered.” The beat sounds like something Tim would have given to Missy Elliot 18 years ago—it’s anything but dark. It sounds silly and out of place among this set, which is too bad because it boasts a fantastic guest verse from the continually underrated Pusha T associate Ab-Liva.

The album’s most fascinating moment is the trip-hop channeling, synth heavy “Keep Dealing,” featuring one time Jay Z protégée Beanie Sigel—a song that involves Push belting out the lyrics, “Goddamn Batman, Holy Toledo,” with all earnestness.

Darkest begins very strongly and promising, but quickly loses focus and shows its flaws with its less successful material. In a year where I’ve listened to less rap music than usual, it is, however, refreshing to hear something new from one of my favorite rappers, despite the fact that this collection is exponentially less cohesive and less immediate sounding in comparison to My Name is My Name. Even with all that holds it back, there are still instances of sheer brilliance, and Pusha T should never be doubted as a performer—his lyrics are, overall, as cutting and subtly clever as always, and his diction and delivery are precise and urgent. It’s just here that his urgency gets weighed down and partially lost within some strange and cluttered production choices.

Darkest Before Dawn is out on 12/18 via G.O.O.D Music.