Purposely sloppy but brutally direct in his approach, Ken Carson pushes rage music to its most sonically extreme form. The 22 songs on the rapper’s fourth studio album, More Chaos, aren’t about anything in the traditional sense. They’re just hedonistic flexes of varying length, with Carson riding glitchy, glossy, and often poorly mixed beats packed with deafening, distorted bass. He mutters his signature snicker (“Huh, huh, huh, huh, huh, huh”), delivers a half-slurred, half-mumbled flow, and stumbles across a few quotables along the way.
If this all sounds familiar, it’s because we’ve been here before, with 2023’s A Great Chaos, to be exact. As its title suggests, More Chaos is more of an extension of that project’s sound rather than a full-fledged sequel, setting itself up to be considered minor—and in many ways, it is.
If you were to quantify the growth between these two albums as a line, it would be nearly horizontal. Carson has ever so slightly improved as a rapper, if not as a lyricist, though not enough to make up for the fact that the entire endeavor, even at its most exciting, feels repetitive, right down to the same drum and hi-hat patterns.
Like A Great Chaos, the album cranks the soft clipping to the max, sprinkles in brass and strings, and lets Carson audibly give zero fucks (to the point that, when he wants to show he cares on “Thx,” he proclaims, “For you, I would’ve gave a fuck”). But what was thrilling on the previous album lacks the same bite on More Chaos—especially on the bloated back half, which skimps on memorable moments outside of “Ghoul,” where horror-movie screams are layered into the song’s demonic beat. On the opposite end of the spectrum, the hilariously juvenile “Kryptonite” finds Carson rhyming “dickmatized” with “suicide.”
There’s enough solid material here to ensure that More Chaos isn’t a complete wash, including a three-track run—“Blakk Rokkstar,” “LiveLeak,” “Diamonds”—that comes fully equipped with diabolically nasty mid-track beat switches. Elsewhere, “Trap Jump” features a triumphantly hard-hitting piano line—courtesy of the usually unreliable Lil 88—that sounds kind of evil, with Carson a tad more locked in than usual. He stalls the track’s momentum a bit at the start by repeating “Huh, huh, I’m lettin’ off rounds” five times but makes up for it with a vengeance-fueled verse that imagines a world where Slick Rick and Ed Hardy are considered high art.
But it’s difficult to shake that Carson isn’t a terribly charismatic force. Even when he seems to be genuinely trying to spit—as if he has something to prove, like on closer “Off the Meter”—the end result is only as strong as the surrounding elements. The track marks the first collaboration between Carson, Playboi Carti, and Destroy Lonely, a moment that should feel like a victory lap for the Opium label. Instead, Carti’s phoned-in, wannabe-Future performance and the dated, 2020-era SoundCloud production turn it into a non-event. At this point, one hopes that there’s something new on the horizon for Carson other than Even More Chaos.
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