Chuck Strangers
A Forsaken Lover’s Plea
LEX
For Chuck Strangers, Brooklyn is both a hometown and a companion. Through sharp details, the Pro Era veteran has always given life to the discarded milk crates and broken Hennessy bottles that frame his Flatbush section of the borough, transforming the setting into an omnipresent being he has no choice but to engage with. He colors it all with jazz on tracks that evoke either sentimental warmth, resigned melancholy, or quiet heartbreak. He continues that relationship on A Forsaken Lover’s Plea, an album that chronicles both Strangers’ BK connection and a dissolved romance. With noirish production, layered nuance, and plenty of humanity, Strangers renders broken love, hidden trauma, and belated realizations through the prism of the town that raised him.
Featuring beats from himself, Animoss, NV, Graymatter, and The Alchemist, the sounds on A Forsaken Lover’s Plea are foggy, but Strangers’ rhymes are lucid. His recollections peek through the mist with poignance and real-time immediacy; you can walk with him to Ali’s Roti Shop, or kick it while he sips some Decoy on Church Ave. On the Alc-produced “Ski’d Up,” Strangers recalls drinking with friends and being a little too entertained by a spontaneous street fight as he injects the dreary flutes and casual chaos with a burst of sociological analysis. For “Too Afraid to Dance,” he remembers the majesty of Union Square Park before ending with a hefty dose of fatalism: “Which block will you be outlined in chalk on?,” he asks, as if a grisly death in your own community could be assigned with the straightforward certainty of a zip code.
It’s all threaded together by an ambiance that evokes a sense of reflection. With its soul sample, “Ali’s Roti Shop” plays out like an ambivalent trip to the past, the disembodied vocal chop in the hook rendering memories as vapors Strangers struggles to hold onto. Meanwhile, the bluesy, subdued title track features a chipmunk-soul hook evoking frenzied emotions. The contrast between that and Strangers’ monotone underscores the type of lover’s desperation he’s determined to keep invisible on the track: “A forsaken lover’s plea, too G to take a knee.” Strangers walks a tightrope between heartfelt mediation and a learned numbness throughout the project, with the hazy atmosphere coating his ruminations in the character of Flatbush. On tracks like the stylish “Polish Jazz,” he dives headfirst into slick talk, trading bars with Pro Era teammate Joey Bada$$. It plays out like a detour from the glass-half-empty subtext of the LP, which feels a bit more downcast than efforts like his 2018 debut Consumers Park or last year’s The Boys & Girls EP.
While Strangers’ delivery can be a tad one-note, his rhyme structures and the beats he crafts them over across A Forsaken Lover’s Plea are dynamic enough to keep everything from getting too monotonous. Strangers proves here that he’s still got new depths to explore from new angles. In what’s felt like a classical New York revival in the underground, this record is further proof of why Chuck Strangers should never be forsaken.
