A surreal soundscape sets the tone for a cutting rap from Andrew Seely, better known as Morsifire, in the first track of his debut LP Metanoia, “Slice,” but this lush sonic backdrop will play a part much greater than most in this multilayered studio album. In this track, the chest-pounding hip-hop epic “77 Skeletons” and sublime slow jam “The Hunter (featuring Dogthief),” Morsifire will use every element of the instrumentation as a means of bearing his heart and soul to us, and while his vocal is one of the biggest reasons why I would tell alternative rap fans to check out his work this November, it is but one component in the elaborate vehicle of virtuosity and aesthetical experimentation that is Metanoia.
URL: https://www.morsifire.com/
“Hadal Paradise” comes out swinging hard with a blunt vocal that eventually relaxes into a balladic melody that is as soft as those first few strands of instrumental magic we hear at the start of “Slice” are. “Graves” is the most harmonious ballad on the album; driven by a stunning acoustic guitar part and a vocal that is moving beyond words, especially in the peak of the chorus. After a brief intermission in “I See You,” Emily Afton joins Morsifire for the brutally honest “Contact,” another song that cuts deep and clearly stems from the pain that Seely has experienced in his young life. This midsection of Metanoia alone makes it a must-listen LP, but what the third act of the tracklist holds finishes us off with even more might than what we began with.
Dark, intimidating bass tones flood a neon melody with an angst and discord in “So Far” that stretches out into “What I Lost” only to crumble under the weight of the onslaught of Massive Attack-style beats. There’s a bit more optimism in this track than in the suffocating but ultimately awe-inspiring “I Can’t Stay,” which alongside the instrumental “A Letter” brings the album to an end in an extraordinarily cinematic fashion. As the dust begins to clear after the music ceases to play, the heaving emotional subtext behind everything that we’ve just heard starts to set in, and it is only at this point that we realize just how personal a story we’ve been told in the last eleven tracks.
AMAZON: https://www.amazon.com/Metanoia-Explicit-Morsifire/dp/B07XQRQK69
What Morsifire accomplishes in his debut album is far and away beyond what most of his peers in the modern experimental rap game could ever do on their own. There is no filler on Metanoia, nor is there any wasted space in its theatrically-styled tracklist; what we find in songs like “77 Skeletons,” “Graves” and “I Can’t Stay” is a picture window into the tortured soul of an artist who has found the perfect way of purging his emotional burdens. Andrew Seely is a man bloodied but unbowed and totally absorbed by the music that he shares with us in Metanoia, and if this is just a taste of what his future records are going to sound like, there should be no doubting his impending reign over an emerging generation of pop songwriters.
Jodi Marxbury