“My music used to get bad reception like Cricket phones/ Now there are bars everywhere like AT&T, homes,” raps Lex Jordan on “Tomorrow Comes,” the first song on Lexicon’s latest album.
On My Time, the UNC Senior not only voices his improvement but substantiates the claims with consistently polished and fertile lyrical ploy.
Lexicon, Jordan’s monicker — which alludes to the vocabulary of a language — has impressive wordplay, and he employs it to create a cosmopolitan hip-hop packed with metaphors that humbles the competition.
He understands the wounds of the young adult and his rapping bleeds relevance to their psyches.
If Drake is ever going to have a successor, Lexicon is next in line. He has a refined, unique voice with consistent flow when he is rapping, but his R&B side is more old-school Rick James than Drake’s new-age urbane chivalry.
On My Time, Lexicon hustles over bass-heavy Southern beats and tangos with Latin melodies, maintaining strong commanding flows over continually diverging backgrounds.
He has a post-club flow with smooth rapping and a courtly drive. Using the beats as his only wing-man, Lexicon seals the deal repeatedly.
When a rapper doesn’t have the ice and gold to rap about, they have to use relevance through politics, love and sex to connect with their audience — this proves to be Lexicon’s forte.
But it’s not all mastery. A tornado of metaphors wreak havoc on the album. Every verse is glued together with the word “like,” a creative defect he relies on like a knife in a gun fight (no metaphorical pun intended).
