Monaleo likes struggle music. Kicking ass fits the Houston rapper’s rowdy, swaggering persona, which channels a professional wrestler’s bodily would possibly and theatrical libido. Although she doesn’t make outright slab joints, in spirit Monaleo carries the torch for the Texas sub-genre of huge sounds and greater personas. She raps with power, her boasts and punchlines touchdown like strikes, her outsized confidence beating down your block like a candy-painted swanga.
Her debut The place the Flowers Don’t Die supplied a peek beneath this steely character, pairing her slap-happy revels with schmaltzy R&B and gritty storytelling. She has a powerful singing voice, however typically the latter match higher along with her She-Hulk raps. The fists she’s so typically hurling hit totally different within the context of her white-knuckle tales of poverty and melancholy on songs like “Sober Thoughts” and “Ridgemont Child.” EP Throwing Bows lacks that ballast. The Monaleo of those chintzy, throwaway songs is a caricature who says something and fights for nothing.
The anger Monaleo always invokes is canned and impersonal, extra bit than catharsis. That may be tremendous if her rapping had been compelling, however the high quality of her writing is inconsistent. From line to line, she’s going to swing from slick and menacing to deeply corny. “I’ll take out her tooth so she will be able to actually pop her gums,” she snaps on opener “Drunk Freestyle,” a very intelligent bar. However a clunker referencing Spongebob instantly follows: “I’m the one who put on the pants, however I’m not a sq..”
The document is full of such momentum-killing wordplay. “Queen and Slime,” a Bonnie and Clyde-style duet with Stunna 4 Vegas, feels like Tee Grizzley fan fiction. “Ee-er” turns “eater” right into a double-entendre for the sound of a squeaky mattress however doesn’t really feel notably raunchy as she and Sauce Walka pile on weak puns. “I be twitching after I nut, oh my god, am I a streamer,” Monaleo raps. Plenty of her intercourse songs, which make up about half the document, don’t have any spark. She likes to say her dominance in mattress, however her escapades are pleasureless. One of many strangest traces comes on “Leo Luv the Sluts,” a boring ode to her roster of simps. “Deal with a nigga just like the bros, I say no homo once we fucking,” she, uh, boasts. I don’t suppose it’s kink-shaming to name that line silly.
The beats are simply as phoned-in. Many of the instrumentals are generic lure fare comprised of 808 kicks right here, snares and hi-hats there. Just a few deviate from the template, however the lack of fashion and texture persists. “Wam Bam,” a grating facsimile of a Waka Flocka tune, is constructed round a boring flip of Britney Spears’ “Poisonous.” “Pimpin’ Ain’t Useless” takes the Beastie Boys pattern popularized on Huge Tuck’s “Not a Stain On Me” and tosses in tinny drums and a ringtone-quality melody. The general impact of those canned beats is numbed familiarity, copies of copies of copies.
In principle, a wall-to-wall basher ought to match proper into rap’s present obsession with rage, mosh pits, and grudges. However not like, say, Rico Nasty’s Anger Administration or Playboi Carti’s Entire Lotta Pink, Throwing Bows lacks a unifying imaginative and prescient of anger—and one among Monaleo. She’s mentioned she needs to be greater than an “aggressive artist,” however feels compelled to maintain writing these sorts of songs “due to who I’ve change into in folks’s lives.” However the songwriting right here is so perfunctory that it doesn’t even register as fan service. Monaleo might imagine she’s pleasing the group with all this rah-rah flexing, however from my seat, the struggle appears to be like thrown.