Western Tink & Beautiful Lou – Mobbin’ No Sobbin’

Western Tink & Beautiful Lou – Mobbin’ No Sobbin’
Mishka: 2013

He has improved as a rapper since, but Western Tink’s 2010 song “Hittin’ Corners” might be the best entry point to the Texan’s catolog. Over oOoOO’s claustrophobic “Seaww”, Tink waxes positivity and paranoia with a conversational deadpan that has become his trademark.

Although they have worked together often in the past, Mobbin’ No Sobbin’ is Beautiful Lou and Western Tink’s first project together and is Western TInk’s most coherent release yet. Last March’s Chillin’ Like a Civilian seven-track mixtape found Western Tink rapping over the Weeknd’s “Loft Music” on one track and a Weeknd flip on another one, but the highlight was the extra-moody murk of “Live N Let Die”, Beautiful Lou’s only credited production on the tape.

Nothing on Mobbin’ No Sobbin’ even begins to approach the darkness of “Live N Let Die”. Even the somber affairs are grounded more in wide-eyed wonder (“Today”) and grind at all cost mentality (“Loser”) than the navel-gazing that occasionally caused things to bog down in his earlier output.

“Gity Up” rides a warped, slow-rolling beat, and where Tink has usually been content to chill in the pockets of the beat, rapping whenever he feels the need, he is relatively ferocious on this one. “I got your girl on my dick looking like a sock puppet,” he raps, offering up the best dick line of 2013 over a molasses vocal sample. And while Western Tink is more comprehensible than Lil B, with whom he shares a certain childlike awe at the world, he still has a habit of meandering off into his own head far enough for us to get lost along the way. Album-opener “Today” is a two-minute ode to the things that have Tink feeling “smaller than a bitch,” which include the Texas sky, bathroom lights and especially God.

A third of the 21 tracks on Mobbin’ No Sobbin’ are interludes or skits, but the album doesn’t drag at all, even though Beautiful Lou often brings things down to a codeine amble and Western Tink occasionally sounds on the verge of a weed nap, as on  “Hi-Roller”. But Western Tink sounds so comfortable and mesmerized that it works.

Western Tink is center-stage pretty much the entire time, with only two guest verses appearing on the record. Shady Blaze shows up for a great midtempo verse and hook duties on the hazy, blown-out “Made Man” and Beautiful Lou himself steps out from behind the boards on the UGK-sampling “Short Texas” for one of the album’s most memorable moments. Even without Lou’s verse, “Short Texas” is a standout track, all breezy and bouncy and Western Tink shows off his quirky sense of swagger, rapping “I put my pants on one leg at a time just like you, ‘cept when I put mines on I just make it look cool.” Beautiful Lou, when he raps, sounds pretty great, stretching his syllables, but enunciating clearly. “You get money, and then you die and that’s pretty much it,” he mopes, after calling himself a “taco-eating little bitch” in the song’s intro. Lou’s pessimism works perfectly as a converse to Tink’s exuberance and it would serve them well to rap together more often.

4 out of 5