CONWAY THE MACHINE - God Don’t Make Mistakes

Sometimes I wonder

Will I make it in these streets or will these streets take me under?

The wait has been longer than expected, even though Conway The Machine's solo debut, "From King To A God" (2020), worked well as a preview: an already mature first outing, albeit lacking something more strictly personal, something that would put front and center and delve deeply into a life of excess and violence. The collaborative releases of the past two years, such as "If It Bleeds It Can Be Killed" (2021, with Big Ghost Ltd), "Organized Grime 2" (May 2022, with Trillmatic) and "What Has Been Blessed Cannot Be Cursed" (June 2022, again with Big Ghost Ltd), were further collections of dark, aching hardcore hip-hop with gangsta themes, but none of them managed to sound like the great album that's been awaited ever since his first mixtapes. On top of that, 2021 also brought a solo appetizer, "La Maquina", softer and featuring big-name guests, even with pop hooks. The real album, the long-awaited one, "God Don't Make Mistakes", was finally released in February 2022.

Steeped in introspection, Conway The Machine's slurred, precise, slow-paced rap guides a dozen tracks wrapped in dreamlike, evocative production, starting with the obsessive "Lock Load", featuring the worn-out voice of Beanie Sigel, and continuing with the anxiety-inducing nightmare of "John Woo Flick" or the hallucinatory, sci-fi "Babas", decorated by the sensuality of Keisha Plum and a menacing, echoing electric guitar.

Ranging across hardcore hip-hop stylings in the form of acoustic beats with a '90s appeal and firsthand accounts of crime and hardship that recall the gangsta tradition, the album wraps the listener in a blend of tension and melancholy that grips the heart on tracks like "Piano Love" or on a soul-tinged "Wild Chapters".

Within the claustrophobic setting of a life of regret and remorse, "Guilty" and especially "Stressed" come across as an attempt to recount past traumas and mistakes, laying himself bare in episodes that border on the psychotherapeutic, and even justifying a few self-celebratory lines like those in "So Much More".

The closer is the title track, with liquid keyboards guiding yet another raw account of the hardships endured to reach this long-suffered album. At the very end, an audio clip of his mother Annette Price in tears delivers the final emotional blow, the unfiltered retelling of the emotional torments described throughout the album.

Moving and reflective, "God Don't Make Mistakes" recalls both "Illmatic" and the gangster persona of Jay-Z, blending street-level storytelling with the narration of his own outlaw past, but it finds its magic in Conway The Machine's thoughtful flow, with his trademark delivery made halting by a brutal shooting: thus the trap of drugs and crime, the social maze that leaves so many inhabitants of America's cities with no way out, becomes sound and tells its own story.

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30/09/2022