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Final verdict: 8/10 ★★★★☆
Now here comes a life’s story, all bottled up in a music album and made available for everyone to find meaning in – are you ready?
Well, I would sure hope you are, because Bobby Wizdum recently independently released his 2nd studio album – the peculiar “Before Your Eyes,” available to be streamed through the artist’s own website. Before I go into the musical technicalities of it all, I would like to take a minute to briefly outline Sir Bobby’s profile – a “Bobby Wizdum crash course,” if you will – to help contextualize the 13 new songs he’s got in store for us right here.
It was September 2024 when Bobby was gearing up to release “Long Way Home,” his debut record. A mere few days before the album was slated to be released, Bobby found himself facing some sort of undisclosed attack. Over the course of a several months-long spiral of homelessness and intermittent incarceration, he did the optimum thing one could do in such a predicament; that is, channel his overwhelming troubles into music. Tell the public of his woes, blind all his stupid foes! And out of this arose none other than today’s subject; “Before Your Eyes.”
Musically speaking, this record is something of a mixed bag – you got songs heavily leaning into the whole hip-hop/electronica fusion thing and you got some softer pop songs, yet you also have some vague R&B and peripheral psychedelia thrown in there too. It’s disjointed in a way, but Bobby pulls it off rather well – I’m thus going to portray this fact as making the album a “highly eclectic work that somehow doesn’t fail to tie the loose ends together.” The lyrics explore a vast array of themes pertaining to Wizdum’s lived experience and rapidly yet seamlessly alternate between a confessional tell-all mode and a rather detached fashioning of language.
The arrangements here are pretty straight-forward and this entire record has that gritty lo-fi sheen (or rather, scuff) to it that is representative of bedroom-produced music – I love it for that. Perhaps a long stretch, but “Before Your Eyes” somewhat reminds me of They Might Be Giants’ brilliant self-titled album – not so much in genre or songwriting, but in quality and fidelity. It feels extremely DIY and sort of trippy as a direct result of that, which is perhaps the best treatment these 13 songs could have ever asked for; I cannot envision this album overly polished in production, for it was meant to be exactly as it is.
Is it a perfect album? No, and that justifies my good-but-not-stellar evaluation of it – but as I’ve much talked about before, indie musicians are my darlings and my soul is drawn to all things indie. Quite naturally, “Before Your Eyes” thoroughly scratches that indie itch that has long been residing in my guts. And besides, there’s some real choons here! Bobby has an endearingly idiosyncratic rap flow goin’ for himself and his vision is coherent – “Before Your Eyes” is a pretty damn good time for that. The real meat of this album is to be found in the middle of the tracklist – namely the three-song run of “By The Moonlight” through “Still Chained Melody.” Penultimate track “Dream of Jade” got me pretty good too, and it probably is my favorite cut on here – I was not expecting a sweet piano-infused ballad on this baby, but I sure as hell am not complaining.
Because, well… between you and me, I’ll likely be coming back to that one a fair bit. It somewhat reminds me of Cex’s “Starship Galactica” without the humorous edge – that right there is a certain coziness that’s hard to resist.
8/10. Get on the Bobby wagon, everyone! Choo-choo, folks.
EXPLORE BOBBY WIZDUM:
https://bobbywizlives.com
Silia 
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