Hi everyone, Sniffthony Coughtano here, the Internet's busiest music nerd and it's time for a review of this new Infinity Knives and Brian Ennals record, A City Drowned in God's Black Tears.

Here we have a new collaboration album between multi instrumentalist producer songwriter Infinity Knives as well as producer and rapper Brian Ennals. I've already said the massive title of this thing.

This record, I will say came by way of a recommendation from a fellow content creator who I highly respect – MrFDSignifier – who had a hold of this thing before it was even out. He was hype about it, he said I had to try it. So if the content of this record rubs you the wrong way in any way, blame him.

But yes, these two are based out of Baltimore and have collaborated on a few full length records already, be it King Cobra or Rhino XXL. And they have kept things to a pretty grimy and experimental sound the entire time. Well, experimental in some ways, very blunt and obvious in others.

Instrumentally, aesthetically, genre wise, you never really know what Brian Ennals and Infinity Knives are going to be cooking up. Production from previous collaborations can see them delivering anything from synth funk grooves to grimy 808 drums to church organs. And there is even more versatility here, which we will get into. Meanwhile, Ennals usually comes through with a total barrage of strong blunt force takes, dealing in his view of the world sometimes also his love for cocaine. And it's all packed with the kind of irreverence that'll most likely get you dogpiled on Twitter by a bunch of freaks who claim to care about free speech. You know the type: total edgelord, but will melt down over bars like "Chris Dorner is a mother effing legend / I know that dude's in heaven / After we eat the rich, then we go murder the reverends," which honestly is a pretty vanilla set of bars when you compare that to other passages lyrically on this album.

Truth is though, Ennals isn't here just to offend right wingers throughout this record. He kind of has it out for everybody a little bit, though he is pretty consistently punching up much of the time.

The fact of the matter is is that on pretty much all this record he is really writing these verses like he is not in the industry to make friends. The guy is really rapping like he has nothing to lose or at least see some sort of inherent value in being unabashed and crass about his worldview as opposed to not putting it out there at all. I mean as much as I enjoy this album, I do sort of question what is to be gained by saying some of the things that he does.

But for the most part on this record, I commend his ability to say what I feel like a lot are unwilling to, either by sheer cowardice or just not having the mind for it. Case in point, the opening track on this record is a top down assessment of everything going on currently with the genocide in Palestine and the historical context leading up to that point, even going as far to remind listeners that Benjamin Netanyahu is from freaking Philadelphia.

But yeah, just really consistent flow on this track. He is barking out these bars in a way to where he is just confronting you with the message you can't tune it out. You have to sort of grapple with what Brian is saying on this track in such a way to where the song comes off less like a rap song and more like an impassioned filibuster. Meanwhile, these epic synth layers building up in the background on this sputtering beat just have no right sounding this cinematic.

So yeah, pretty strong start to the record. The following track, again, Brian is coming out of the gate unapologetic, saying that he's happy that the woman who got Emmett Till killed is dead, which is a start. Even making more religious punches as well, saying that God is a snake and the whole garden, you know, garden, Adam and Eve, that whole thing was a setup. Shortly after this, going into, you know, one of those old school hip hop lyrical routines – "Put your hands in the air and wave them like you just don't care." But yeah, he's doing this over all of these ambient buzzing synth layers, proving that Brian can pretty much rap over anything. There are also some unhinged Jack Harlow bars on the track that I don't even want to start to get into.

However, I do find his commentary pretty smart about, given some of the shortcomings morally of those who helped formulate the genre of hip hop, just kind of wondering how far it can take the fans or the culture that was born out of it, morally speaking.

Then after this, another surprise. Because what is effectively the title track of the record is like this chilly acoustic number with these very close haunting vocal harmonies and a lot of plucky guitar arpeggios too. And this creates a very long entrancing passage of music until the atmosphere of the track builds up and it unleashes from hell these heavy doom metal riffs that honestly sound like something off of a the Body album. And it sounds totally unlike anything else on the record, obviously features a couple collaborators too, to make this hellish metal magic happen. Yeah, it's completely out of place, but given how lyrically unhinged and musically versatile the record has been even thus far between the past two tracks, it kind of makes sense. And I actually think this song sounds just as good as comparable artists and tunes you could bring up that are operating in a similar field musically. Like, I could see fans of the band Thou messing with this track.

Following this, the song "Baggy" brings us back into vile industrial hip hop territory with psychedelic synth washes and flows that for sure are going to get the ears perked up of many JPEGMAFIA fan. We have more mean, blasphemous I'm gonna say it, I'm gonna say it type bars on the track that honestly, I wouldn't dare to repeat out of fear that lightning would just come through the roof and strike me dead. And once more we have these grandiose synth passages that sort of escalate, like in the first track, and sound like something out of a John Carpenter cut. It's eerie, it's beautiful, it's lo fi. Sounds like something straight out of a horror film. And yet again, somehow it works.

Following this, we have "Soft Pack Shorty". The whole track is packed with Brian's wild bars about a woman who he's into, and he is into everything about her, especially her feet. The track is toxic but fun. I love this one bar where he's on about she goes through his phone but he can't leave her alone and how if he didn't have this baggage, he would ask her to marry him. It's focused and funny and maybe just like a bit too real.

Then after this, the track "Trevoga" provides another complete switch up. It's this nostalgic, warped little ballad that feels like a lost gem from an old foreign language film soundtrack. Sounds like nothing else previously on the record. How Why? What? And again, the production on the track is amazing. It sounds like an artifact of some sort. And there's a reprise of this track at the end of the album. It's an English variation of the same tune. And again, given how it sounds and the songwriting, the song style, you would think this is some kind of like old lifted sample or something like that. And maybe there is like, you know, some sort of older blueprint or musical piece that this is being worked off of. But looking into the Bandcamp credits of the song, there is like original instrumental credits on it.

So again, there clearly is original work going into this track and its reprise. But simultaneously, none of it sounds new. The recording, the songwriting, the instrumentation, all of it sounds archaic and just further adds to the track list feeling like just all these wildly disparate pieces coming together in the most random way.

The rest of the record, in my opinion, is also pretty killer. We have "Sometimes Papi Chulo", where I think Brian spits some of his most real and endearing bars and does so over this really cool cumbia beat, complete with these woozy, entrancing vocal harmonies on the chorus that are beautiful. Then there's "Everyone I Love Is Depressed", which is this kind of upbeat, raw, funky jammer that is all about not killing yourself.

You know, imagine that Logic song. But if it were actually like kind of funny and irreverent, it's very Das Racist-esque in my opinion. Or even like De La Soul, if they had spent a fair amount of time Internet trolling before they released their first album. And of course, the final moments of this album continue to go down swinging with more surprises.

There's "Two Headed Buffalo", which is like this seven minute indie folk ballad, which again, what? Yeah, it's this rootsy lo fi indie folk piece that is super long and expansive and honestly sounds like something that could have been on the latest Big Thief album.

This record feels like if I had a really cool rap friend and he wanted to make me a mixtape of just like some of the craziest, weirdest stuff that he's into. And it just so happened that on some of the tracks he just decided to spit on them. And I don't know if I could say this song is like one of the best tunes I've ever heard in this field, but it's surprisingly good considering it's not like the bread and butter of the record, stylistically speaking.

And then we have a live cut which sees Brian delivering these part spoken, part sung vocal passages over some beautiful orchestral instrumentation from the Mind On Fire Orchestra. The whole track feels like a random, somewhat twisted musical theatre piece, which after the randomness of the track list up until this point, why the fuck not? And the track does, in a weird way, kind of soften him a little bit. As awkward as some parts of the vocal performance are, it does reveal that there is like a lot of pain and trauma behind his very sort of outward and aggressive in your face energy.

And like I said earlier, the final track on the record is like that reprise of that
"Trevoga" track, but now in English it's "O Trouble".

But yeah, City Drowned. After kind of perusing Brian's and Infinity Knives previous works is most definitely their boldest work yet together. Brian's writing and personality and sense of humor and perceptiveness across the record is impressive. He always has something to say, even after he's been saying a lot. And the musical versatility of this record is just like something to behold. It's all just so random and done so well.

But by that same token, I sort of struggle and wonder, like, what will the audience for this record be? That's kind of difficult to spell out and explain because it is just so wildly versatile. I mean, maybe the record could feel a little bit more cohesive. It is slightly, I think, all over the place, to a fault. And while I do agree with a lot of Brian's points across this LP, there are moments where it feels like he's just being edgy for the sake of being edgy.

With that being said, though, I was thoroughly impressed with the vast majority of this record, and I'm most likely gonna find myself coming back to this album again again throughout the rest of the year, even if there are a couple of tracks that I'm most likely not going to be in the mood for all the time. Which is why I'm feeling a light to decent 8 on this album.

Anthony Fantano, Infinity Knives, Bryan Ennals, Forever.