Hi, everyone. Crossthony Roadtano here, the Internet's busiest music nerd. It's time for a review of this new Cordae album, The Crossroads.

Yes, brand new LP from rapper, songwriter Cordae. He has dropped a record here whose title really made me do a double take because his debut album in 2019, that also featured an image of Cordae in front of a bunch of signs pointing in various directions. It was titled The Lost Boy, and it was a record that I think was really effective in its characterization of Cordae as an up and coming artist. The framing being he's a talented spitter and writer with endless potential and stood out in a rap landscape where increasingly it seems like bars matter less and less and less.

In that respect, he's a glitch in the matrix. I mean, after all, he barely made sense within the context of the YBM crew that he came up in, that he's now very much like, outlasted. Also, remember the viral splash he originally made years ago at this point, doing a response to J. Cole's "1985".

I bring all of this up to say the era in which Cordae is this young rapper who is finding his way after somehow hitting it big, that's over. It's done. Cordae is a rapper with a past now, especially when he is nostalgically and sentimentally rapping about spitting bars with his past friend, the late Juice Wrld.

So the fact that on this new record, Cordae is still working this angle where he's a fresh face in rap who's still finding his way... It's giving a bit of arrested development. At this point, I would say Cordae is pretty established as an artist. This is his third album, after all. That's right. He had a second album I can barely recall at this point that dropped two years ago, which was just one of those albums that wasn't great or terrible enough to really warrant all that much discussion. Because right now, this deep into his career, Cordae really needs to be in search of a sound, a direction, a way to build on what he has given us up until this point.

Now, I will say to an extent, in his defense, he does that a little bit during some of the more personal moments on the record where he describes himself giving it all to a relationship that he just watches fall apart through a series of very ugly legal proceedings. There are bars on this record where he shares in his new love for being a dad, showcasing the importance of various connections that he has with his family and loved ones on the track "What Really Matters", too, or one of the best and most thoughtfully written tracks on the entire record, "06 Dreaming", where Cordae lyrically draws a bunch of parallels to his aspirations for fame and success in music, with his mom's own attempts at doing the same when he was younger, trying out for American Idol, as well as P. Diddy's Making the Band show with both of those efforts, essentially going nowhere and then having to watch his mom give up on this dream to get a real job and just play that motherly role.

It's also telling how much Cordae borrows from old-school Kanye West on this track, too, like really the College Dropout era, where Kanye famously spat bars about a lot of young women who were having trouble balancing the struggles of pursuing a higher education, dealing with the debt of that, trying to be successful in life and in work.

But what feels like a very effective and self-aware reference at first snowballs into a lot of over extended biting deeper into the record, as there are quite a few tracks on this LP where Cordae more or less feels locked into these older Kanye-type bars and flows, and it becomes a matter of whether or not you want to listen to an imitation versus the real thing, be it on the track "Nothings Promised", as well as "Never See It" and "All Alone" to an extent. It's like something he subconsciously slips into here and there, with the song "No Bad News" being a pretty obvious exception, given that Kanye has a very goofily-sung feature on that track.

So it seems like Cordae is trying not to copy him for the whole song. So instead, he just off-ramps into a bunch of flows and bars that seem like they were taken from the Drake playbook, really from the Nothing Was The Same era. "Running the road, that's bad news / Gang-affiliated tattoos / Stakes is high like wagyu."

Come on, man. Come on.

Whether it's the Frank Ocean-style vocal leads on "Syrup Sandwiches" featuring Joey Bada$$, or even the Lauryn Hill vocal interpretations from the track "Pray", where Cordae is very much calling back to the Fugee's version of the song "Killing Me Softly". Sometimes it's just painfully clear how much Cordae is a product of his music diet. And artistically, he continues to inhabit this middle ground where he's clearly trying to give us music that is personal and dynamic, certainly more substantive than a lot of what you hear out there these days in terms of artists throwing these auto-crooned vocal riffs over the most basic Fruity Loop beats or instrumental lentils that are just a bunch of thrown together splice stems.

His tracks are definitely not wash, rinse, repeat in quite that way. But by that same token, he's not excelling artistically in a way that's going to result in him making the the kinds of waves that his most obvious influences have. Because truth be told, the worst moments on this record aren't when Cordae is being super cringe or vapid or anything like that. No, the biggest weakness of this record comes from Cordae's tendency to be average or unmemorable or redundant. Because in the tracklist, one casual bop with Lil Wayne was really enough, even if he agreed to do two. The nostalgic tales of saving up for stuff you really want to buy, as well as hanging out with friends on "Summer Drop". This track certainly comes from a good place lyrically, but the execution as well as the beat choice on this one is super bland.

The track "Don't Walk Away", for as sad as the writing on this song is – from as heart-wrenching the content of this track is – it just really flatlines emotionally, especially with this opening vocal performance from Jordan Ward, which just completely flatlines out of the gate and hits like a cold fish.

Now you know, toward the end of the record, while I do appreciate this track content-wise for what it brings to the record, it truly is another heartfelt moment, musically and structurally, I just don't really feel like this song is a super strong finish. If this "crossroads" thing is a concept and a theme for this record, it leaves things off in a very inconclusive manner.

Yeah, despite the title of this album, what direction Cordae is going in here just isn't really clear at all. I feel like, yet again, we are getting another album from him that ultimately is fine. It's fine. There's not really a whole lot you can say about it other than that, which is why I'm feeling a decent 6 on it. It's okay, it's decent, it's listenable, it's not too bad, but it's not amazing either.

Anthony Fantana. Cordae. Forever.