With a vowel-intolerant stage name and brand identity, LSMK is what can best be described as an alternative R&B artist slash avant-garde hip-hop guy, and Lush is his fantastically confusing brand new EP.

If LSMK wanted us to understand his music, he’ll make it easy for us to. You know when you were younger and you were eating with your parents and it came time to eat the meat and your parents cut it into smaller chunks to make it easier for you to chew and swallow? Yea, LSMK is not your daddy and he’s not going to spoonfeed you. “Dumb it down” best describes his high-handed approach to creating music.  

They say I was too not commercial /

I said book is not hard to read now / 

He sees it as somewhat of a duty to educate the listener with his music and not just to entertain. For instance, he talks about pleasing his woman until she’s able to decipher hieroglyphics and ancient languages on “Blow for Breakfast”, which is ironically one of the easier records to assimilate on Lush. But if you didn’t know what Yiddish meant before listening to the record, you can always send LSMK a thank you note later. That’s how a lot of this project goes, in fact if any of the 11 songs on here was ever going to get played repeatedly on Lagos radio, it would be a song like that.  

Lush is highly abstracted but if you’re able to peel away the layers, you’d find that a lot of the project could ultimately be about LSMK’s personal life, so at least some of his subject matter is relatable. He starts the project with a reassurance to his “Mrs.” that their bond will make it through the resistance of her family members and ends with a plea of sorts to “Mr. Father of My Mrs.”, with a lady singer Oiza playing the role of a reluctant father. If both storylines were developed better and with more clarity, they’d have been more impactful songs. Instead, through most of the album, LSMK relies too heavily on larger-than-life production and a disruptive pattern to arranging songs to keep the listener entertained while he tries to educate and enlighten. 

So Much Life transitions from half-rapped, half-sung verses to a slightly off-key chorus to a high-octane drum performance as it fades. It is non-conformist but producer Fiz ties it all together somehow. Unfortunately, when the meandering “Hush” becomes unintelligible, there isn’t an overbearing production to cover up for it. Speaking of overbearing production, most of the production is, well, overbearing. An album that experiments with these many discordant sounds needs to be engineered better to be fully appreciated.

I came to the realization quite early in this line of work that I did not have to understand an artist to appreciate their music for its artistic merit, or at least not immediately. So I do not have to get LSMK immediately to understand that Lush is a progressive project from a man whose motivation for making music is quite different from the norm. His musical outcome, though not as perfect as he might want you to think, quite understandably follows suit.

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