MAN PLAYS THE HORN – Cities Aviv (2022)

In its opening track, MAN PLAYS THE HORN highlights the growing reality of economic barriers to musicianship, with the narrator claiming that during in childhood, “you could buy a saxophone for $500 and today it costs a person $5000 to buy a saxophone.” The album’s title points to Cities Aviv populist intentions for his art: independently released music – hip hop, in particular – has artistic value to the same extent that “playing the horn” does. While the aforementioned narrator is right to lament the inequity of access to musical instruments and education, the artistic value of rapping is not tainted by the history of oppression that shaped its inception.

Cities Aviv embodies this on MAN PLAYS THE HORN by holding comfort and self-confidence equally. Instrumentals take their time in establishing the album’s hypnotic, nostalgic atmosphere. Paired with sampled excerpts of poetry and criticism, sparse features, and lyrics oscillating between straightforward and meditative, MAN PLAYS THE HORN at times comes across as a more relaxed and nebulous cousin to Earl Sweatshirt’s Some Rap Songs. Clocking in at over 80 minutes, many of the album’s shifting elements get lost in the deluges of its movements. The sense of intention behind this is made clear with cuts like the 12-minute long instrumental “Smoking on a Brighter Day,” but it’s not hard to see how the project could have been made more concise or legible with more incisive editing. That may be the only piece missing for Cities Aviv to truly deserve the victory lap he is taking for himself here.

★★★½