Chughey: “Pivotal” – pure agility and flexibility!
Originally from Rock, MI, and currently residing in Summerville, SC, Chughey, got into making music in 2012 after an accident snowskating. Always having a creative outlet throughout his life – from drawing to skateboarding and snowskating – Chughey needed something to express his creative side after being injured. Drawing inspiration from Eminem, Knowmads, and Atmosphere, among others, he started off remixing tracks, and finding beats to use off the internet, as well as working on developing his skills as a mc and writer.
Chughey has since gone on to release four mixtapes, and an EP: ‘Doodles’ (Jun 2012), ‘Still In The Sticks’ (Sep 2013), ‘Sloth Life’ (Jun 2014), ‘Progress’ (Jan 2016), and his debut EP, ‘Pivotal’ (Aug 2017), produced and engineered by, SkwirllMaster.
There may be rappers who carry emotional weight, rappers who tell evocative stories, rappers with great hooks, or rappers who are resonant, meaningful and relevant, with a strong grasp of what living in 2017 is like. But if you’re looking for only one rapper who incarnates all of those elements in the underground, you will be hard-pressed to find many better than Chughey.
He delivers all of the above combined with pure agility and flexibility, like an unstoppable freight train with an interstate run in his wake. His flow gets baroque, infectious and audacious, stuffed with lightning fast syllables and complex assonance.
Chughey probably has the closest vocal inflections to Eminem I have heard in a while. Right from track one “Sandals”, all through the 6 songs contained on “Pivotal”, we get rhymes. So many rhymes. More rhymes than some rappers manage in a whole catalog of recorded material.
Along with the rhymes come the explicit, aggressive confrontational lyricism and the melody stuffed choruses. Chughey’s voice is a colorful, powerful, persuasive one. The juxtaposition is the perfect summation of an EP that is both self-aware and introspective, but still brash and cleverly catchy. Chughey shows he is in form and some of his peers should start taking notes now.
There’s visceral anger, technical shock-and-awe, alternative-infused rap, and a shed load of emotional referencing. Neither element overpowers the rest, and the result is a balanced body of work that is an assimilation of the Chughey story, thus far. The sheer creativity, bravery, and at times, downright short-fused edginess of tracks like “Dose”, “Undertow” and “Pivotal” ensures that this recording is unceasingly surprising and progressive.
These songs placed alongside “No Fronting” and “Mailman”, hints at the incredibly emotionally raw nature of the record. These SkwirllMaster -produced tracks are about as close as anyone in 2017 will come to bottling the lightning of the “Pivotal” EP.
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