The Ascension of Bladee (333 Review)
In the final days of 2018 Bladee released Icedancer and asked everyone to be nice to him, declared himself a mallwhore and took us to his special place. Produced entirely by Ripsquadd Bladee’s Icedancer mixtape was a deft side step for the elusive and mysterious golden boy CEO of the Swedish Drain Gang music collective. His DMT midway follow up Exeter released earlier this year took us all out on a bright and beautifully optimistic but far too brief summer vacation trip, giving fans who came along for the ride with him an island of respite during what was a universally troubling time to live on planet Earth. Now just a few months later fans have been blessed again with another surprise release from Bladee — his fourth full length studio album 333 executive produced by longtime collaborator Whitearmor — and this time he wants to be sure we’re all being nice to ourselves and one another too.
People can be forgiven for not enjoying or understanding Bladee upon first encounter. In fact this bewilderment is largely a part of his wide reaching appeal to those who take the time to engage with the music and let it confound them. Why all the autotune? Can you even call this rap? Why is he so droll and dull sounding all the time? If you are a drainer (the moniker given to devoted fans of Bladee and his Drain Gang music collective composed of himself, Ecco2k, Thaiboy Digital and producers Whitearmor and Yung Sherman) and you have ever shared a Bladee song you love with somebody, even a devoted Yung Lean fan — you will always be prepared to hear these concerns. The experienced drainer knows to wait, give it a little more time and suggest they try listening again.
There is a well known “drain effect” that has been true with almost all of Bladee’s releases. Even devoted fans often recoil upon first encounter with a new Bladee release and among the fanbase many schisms exist as to which album, mixtape, ep or rare single is the universally perfect Bladee project. If I write that Eversince is his frostbitten future-goth masterpiece (it is) someone is likely to pop up praising the cold and mysterious online dystopia of his first release Gluee as his masterwork. Lauding Red Light for its complex mysticism, beautiful production and bold stylistic shift to a slightly brighter and stranger aesthetic and sound would only earn me ire from the Icedancer devotees ready to shame other drainers for skipping past Cartier’God Icedancer (intermission).
My assertion here is that even among his most devoted fans part of the process of enjoying Bladee is the bewilderment he is able to somehow produce with every fresh move he makes. As soon as you finally begin to understand and appreciate his work and become comfortable with it he somehow manages to switch things up just enough to confound and delight. This is an artist who is always evolving, always challenging himself and his fans to embrace his newest incarnation and always pushing himself to incorporate his authentic self in his work. Now with 333 Bladee is doing the best he can to share the light he has found in his life with all of the rest of us and the “drain effect” is almost nowhere to be found.
I often find myself needing a few good listens and little time to sit with each new Bladee release — even singles like last year’s beautiful track Apple often take a little while to gestate but throughout this career defining album I struggled to dislike or find a deep challenge in enjoying any of it. Perhaps I’ve just grown accustomed to his style and delivery and don’t find it jarring anymore but I think there is something more significant at work here. This may be Bladee’s best and first universally accessible musical project.
Within the opening moment of this record it is starkly clear that things are once again going to be very different. Where Exeter opens with the trill of a sharp carnival alarm bell properly announcing that we’re in for a wild ride of some kind, the opening acoustic guitar strums of “Wings In Motion” are a declaration of an entirely different sort. Even with Bladee’s contemporary and frequent collaborator Yung Lean releasing bedroom style indie rock albums for the past few years under his JonathanLeandoer96 namesake I don’t think anybody expected a soft breathy acoustic ballad on a Bladee project. After listening to him wrestling with the constant struggle between happiness and depression over the sounds of small bright bells and an acoustic guitar for two and a half minutes even those of us moved to tears could be forgiven for the momentary shock of concern that we might be about to listen to a lo-fi bedroom pop record from the man who once proclaimed “Before I get my wrists cut Hope I don’t miss much, hope that I forget about what this was”.
Lucky for us the follow up track “Don’t Worry” arrives just in time with its bright, bubbling production and repeated assurances. “It’s still cute, it’s still fun” the trash star declares before pleading us to “Please don’t worry” and once again he transforms into a beautiful amalgamation of all that came before, focused into something bright and boldly new. Bladee has shapeshifted again and in the process has found a light he aims to share with the people who have followed him along the winding path of his wild catalog of releases thus far. Where Exeter was a fun carnival ride with minimally expressed lyrics, songs like “Don’t Worry” and others later to come such as “Reality Surf”, “It Girl”, “Finder” and especially “Noblest Strive” are practically bursting at the seams with positive affirmations and optimism.
Which isn’t to say the darkness doesn’t seep in through the cracks at times. As much as he wants to celebrate the “crystalline bliss from within” Bladee is well aware eventually the light will fade again. Many fans desperately hope for another project from the Drain Gang CEO more like their most beloved albums from his back catalog — overwhelmingly Gluee and Eversince — and their desire is certainly understandable as those projects are brilliant explorations into the dark corners of a lonesome and outcast mind lashing out against the world. Little sparks of this old worldview bubble up in the lyrics and sounds on this new project but they only serve to prop up the overwhelming joy emanating out of every other corner of the record.
The exception here is the throwback track “100s” which sounds like it would feel equally at place on almost any earlier Bladee project or as a cast off single from the Gluee era — a time when most of his output had a sharper edge and relied heavily on false bravado and braggadocio. With his fanbase currently growing so rapidly that even people who have never heard him are still vaguely aware of him as a meme it is actually fairly modest of him to brag about money on a scale the majority of us can relate to. I hope this track stanches the bleeding a little for fans who are having trouble accepting this new brighter and uplifting direction even if they don’t notice how inclusive the trash star is when he says “The money’s working, I don’t need no feelings”.
Many of the themes on the remainder of the album concern learning to accept oneself as you are and push forward for a better future. On “Oh Well” Bladee muses “Oh damn, almost thought I was different” before shrugging his shoulders to say “Oh well” and play the cards he was given. On no less than two tracks he refers to himself as Cinderella, stating his acceptance of his feminine qualities plainly; “Wear it if it suits”. On “Finder” one of the show stopping stand out tracks he proclaims “My name is not important” before wondering “Uh oh, where did my pain go?” and considering the terrible possibility we all face: “Could it be that I’m not special?”
On “Noblest Strive” Bladee urges listeners to “Turn your mental prison to a maze / turn the maze into a place that you are safe” before assuring us that “Everything will wither and decay / but the energy will stay”. If you don’t emerge from this song with a feeling of overwhelming bliss your empathic receptors may be misconfigured. The followup tune “It Girl” gives Britney Spears’ “Work” a run for its money as the modern working class anthem with Bladee’s infectious hook “In this world you’ve gotta work to be the It Girl”.
Throughout the entire record the production provided by Whitearmor shines, moving in bold and bright unexpected ways and providing texture and weight to everything Benjamin Reichwald chooses to share with us in his lyrics. The lyrics on this record overwhelmingly feel like peeking at the pages of someone’s private journal and the warmth and vulnerability present are immediately disarming. The pairing here is seamless but still full of surprises. Nowhere is this more evident than on the first single for the record “Only One” which was recently released as a music video shot and edited by Ecco2k. A flamenco guitar line haunts the subtle and textured soundwaves as Bladee croons “Every night I count the days I have to wait for you / and every day I count the nights” before the music explodes and the beat drops in like an anvil through the ceiling.
When Bladee finally did a published interview with the music press (Being Bladee, Fader) a bit of his mysticism was lost to fans forever and everyone peeked behind the curtain a little bit and got to meet the real Benjamin Reichwald. Some fans recoiled to learn that the person who wrote so many of their favourite epic depressive anthems was actually a pretty typical person who loved life and positivity and was waking up to the responsibility he had to stop glamorizing states of depression in his work. I vividly recall reading one redditor proclaim in horror that they felt the connection he had felt with the music had been artificially generated and that realization had sent them into an even deeper well of spiraling depression.
This misinterpretation of the Drain CEO’s new direction is steeped in a fear of accepting the good things life has to offer us. Requiring artists we love to suffer for us to make our own suffering seem more significant seems like a cruel and sadomasochistic way to show appreciation. At best it is pure unbridled negative selfishness. Even the sad songs in Bladee’s oeuvre can be counted among the precious and beautiful things that are part of the joy of being alive. As he said himself to Fader:
“You listen to sad music to get out those feelings, and a lot of people can use it to get the sadness out, but you mustn’t stay in the sadness and get even sadder. You should put your sadness out onto the song. Sing it out with me, and you feel better.”
Benjamin Reichwald has sung out all his sadness, for now at least, and those of us who are along for the ride are singing along with him in bliss. There may come a time in the future when devoted fans who hope to one day have another album like Eversince get their wish but I sincerely hope not.
