REVIEW: Curren$y – “Weekend At Burnie’s”

Curren$y / Weekend At Burnie’s / Warner

For New Orleans-bred rapper Curren$y, attempting to transcend personal style to form short skirt club-thumpers isn’t on his agenda. Numbers of that shape are obsolete on Weekend At Burnie’s as the fluid hip hop scholar burns through cannabis expositions, being ingenious, direct and rarely showing a sign of weakness. Not to say the sixth studio session is an image of perfection; it’s not. The spotless radio hip hop production morphs from being warm and sociable to bland over time with pace-setting tracks (“#Jetsgo”) being strikingly similar to the later rounds of the record (“What’s What”, “Money Machine”).

But Curren$y is no slouch; being outcasted from the Cinderella fame – which rivals such as Wiz Khalifa and Lil B have gorged on – has tested his hunger to stand tall with an original flow instead of joining those contrasted next to him. The high-life testimonies (“You See It”), illicit and indistinct rhymes (“JLC”) and breaths of a woman in love with lust (“She Don’t Want A Man”) commend the way Weekend At Burnie’s rolls through images and ideas, a throwback compliment to Jay-Z’s The Blueprint 2 and hip-hop in the mid-90s’. When Curren$y exhibits that taste for jogging through verses – as on the piano ditty “This Is The Life” – what’s ingested is more sweet than sticky. “Hits from the bong, Cali strong / Got me feeling like I could kill a man, but I would rather kill a bass line,”. If only those compared to him blazed with such prowess.

Download: “This Is The Life”, “Still”

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