“Die About It” effortlessly switches up cadences mid-flow, shifting from a laconic swing to a sparse, staccato yelp and back. While Gates’ stories suggest a battle-damaged cynic, his restless wordplay gives voice to the excitable language nerd beneath the gruff exterior. But where Gates has pulled back from the emotional heft that made Luca Brasi such a compelling character composite, he’s poured his energy into the mechanics of rhyming with such fervor that what’s being said in these songs is often trumped for intrigue by the way he says it. Stranger Than Fiction is a litany of near-misses with police and armed foes interspersed with emotionally guarded examinations of the trust issues they leave as collateral damage.
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“Tiger” elaborates on the period when he quit dealing drugs to pursue a career in rap, only to fall prey to a series of janky promoters and label executives whose shifty machinations made him the vic instead of the villain. Stranger Than Fiction draws much of its gravitas from Gates’ own colorful back story: he cuts through the airy synths and open spaces of “4:30AM” with a travelogue of betrayal for which he’s as much a culprit as a victim, and on “4 Legs and a Biscuit”, a viewing of the gangster flick King of New York trips off a broadside about the constant strain of legal woes.
Whether the tense shift in his songwriting is a conscious attempt to put some distance between himself and his trap house hook-men contemporaries or a function of him stockpiling melodies for a future mainstream push, his knack for detailed, despairing storytelling cogently picks up the slack. Save for the hooky despondency of late-album gem “Don’t Know What to Call It”, Stranger Than Fiction’s Kevin Gates is world-weary in all the spots where he was starry-eyed and reflective the last time around. The accomplished tunefulness of Luca Brasi highlights “Paper Chasers” and “Neon Lights” is pushed to the margins here. Where The Luca Brasi Story’s itinerant sprawl and plentiful guest appearances played like a game of show and prove, Stranger Than Fiction whittles things down to a series of pithy two- to three-minute nuggets that lurch toward resolution, often finding it within a verse or two.
He's has since inked a deal with Atlantic Records (who summarily squished the 22-song tape into a digital EP) and released the low-stakes digital album Stranger Than Fiction. But the weathered rasp of Gates' voice lent a measure of grit to the love songs even as it made the deterministic criminality elsewhere in the tape feel lived-in. In street rap, a fixation on romance is often seen as a mark against the artist’s perceived toughness, as if the one gives the lie to the other. Songs outlining the perils of trafficking narcotics were heard next to those inspired by romance novelist Nicholas Sparks’ The Notebook and the Twilight series. Louisiana rapper Kevin Gates’ The Luca Brasi Story matched the brutality of coke rap to earnest sentimentality and melodicism with such a finesse that it obscured the record's essential weirdness.
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