Fundamentally, there’s no great mystery to what Gabriel Fernandez does. Right from the start of H.T. almost exactly a decade ago, ‘Nandez proved himself a student of both the Wu-Tang and Five Elements schools on the mic (if not in his choice of productions), a guy loading up bars like an empty gat and letting loose in the booth. You could take a bit of his tracing-wheeled pattern paper and overlay it with, say, Raekwon only to find there wasn’t much in it — you were getting the same suit. False Profit, his latest album with producer Thomas Maggart, isn’t any kind of radical departure taken on a macro level. But don’t let that confuse you for the micro of how he does it, which is the real magic.
Themes present include your usual fare of urban nightmares, friends gone away or simply gone, aspirations of wealth and success, and the unending conflict just to get from breakfast to dinner and back to bed at the end of a long one. Drawing on a polyglot background — his mom was Malian, his dad an Argentine UN employee who worked across the planet, and his first language is French — ‘Nandez is adept at his utilization of language. That he’s lately followed in the vein of guys like Boldy James and Roc Marciano and stuck to one producer for his full-lengths (as he did on Object Permanence with Wino Willy earlier this year) plays to both sides’ strengths, too. It’s no different here with Thomas Maggart, who’s worked with the likes of Anklejohn, Estee Nack, Raz Fresco and Siddiq. Maggart errs on the side of dusty grooves and soul samples for False Profit, and it complements Gabe’s smoky, low-slung, ever so slightly stuffed-up delivery.
And what a delivery it is. The thing that keeps me coming back to ‘Nandez is his air intake and how he juxtaposes carefully deployed, tactically ornate rhymes with a sense of absolute control over what he’s saying; sidewinding verses bend in submission to fit tidily into his flows, and it’s easy to replay songs and still be left wondering how the hell he can slide all these words so effortlessly into the beats. You’re not getting any kind of bouncy Chance the Rapper-esque “Gipetto” or Neptunes-like “Transactions” here, but the sweet, soaring samples of “Crane Stance” or “Joker Card” only serve to bring out the grittier qualities of Gabe’s voice. In the battle of inches it takes to claim your spot in the hip-hop landscape, ‘Nandez has it figured out.
At 10 tracks and 27 minutes, False Profit hits a slightly sweeter spot than Pangaea between the brevity of Object Permanence and the bloat of H.T. III’s deluxe variant … but I say “bloat” when I really mean “blunt,” and one listen to any of the songs presented here ought to sway you definitively one way or the other. When it comes to masters of a craft, there’s scant middle ground to be had.
