On The BricktionaryBoldy's steadiness doesn't feel a hair out of place amid Fraud's heightened entropy—even on more mainstream collaborations like the Tee Grizzley-assisted standout “Cecil Fielder,” where there's no doubting who's in control. Boldy's superpower always made the small phrases feel monumental, piling sage wisdom on mortality and precariousness into the annals of the road. “This open street shit game/One minute you'll be doing it, the next minute you're back on your knuckles,” he raps with trademark confidence on “Pillar to Post,” fully aware of how quickly he can turn a dime. Reflection has long been a feature of Boldy's raps, but as he continues to move away from the traumatic aftermath of the devastating car accident, the spectrum of his memories widens to put his entire journey under a microscope.
Boldy's level of evocative detail is extraordinary, constructing expansive worlds from his memories of Detroit in a matter of seconds. Specifics bubble up in Boldy's foreground like nagging afterthoughts: hooking up with down-the-road affiliates whose names you could only remember if you had your own legs, needing to be convinced not to wipe out a rival on his way to the top, seeing visceral images of bullets passing through the back and out of the stomach and he feels a lie when he hears small changes in the voice projections by telephone. On “Harvey Grant,” it's like he introduces you to his entire family tree while making flights to the local Target and Home Depot, concluding with a prayerful plea: “Forgive me for my sins and all the evil in the hearts of men.”
The technical brilliance of Boldy and Fraud The Bricktionary it's direct and to the point, not overly complicated, and allows the respective production and writing styles to fit together like puzzle pieces. This kind of no-frills approach relies on inherent quality and reliability, not bells and whistles and leaps into the stratosphere. Closer “Fish Grease” wanders with a serene vocal chorus that could record an ascent to heaven, as Boldy takes the listener through a surprisingly honest time-by-time catalog of his close calls and epic triumphs. “Remember to smile in the rain, on the nights it rained/Now I'm in the Range seaplane,” work whiter than a napkin/Hood call me Sir Brick Van Exel aka Mr. Pyrex Chapman/Clio bangin' off the lilac, the phone is ringing like a telethon,” he beams with understated satisfaction. True, by most accounts, the milkman began to disappear from public view in the 1960s, preventing the proliferation of suburbs, grocery stores, and refrigerators. But in Boldy's delivery, you can almost hear a closed wink, as if he's sure his magnetism will never go out of style — no matter how much things change around him.
