With her soaring voice, Kanye West affiliate Danielle Balbuena, AKA 070 Shake, has a knack of investing productions with boundless freedom. She cracks West’s 2018 track Ghost Town wide open with a yearning, melodic nostalgia, and on her 2020 debut Modus Vivendi, the New Jersey-born rapper croons through everything from forlorn synthpop to bass-heavy rhythm.
On her second album, You Can’t Kill Me, Balbuena takes a more subdued tack, with mixed results. Highlights come when her melismatic range is foregrounded: building harmonies over the rhythmic chants of opener Web; performing electronically processed runs over the thump of History; expounding on the sensuousness of a woman’s dress on Blue Velvet. But across the record’s 14 tracks there are too many moments where Balbuena adopts a middling mumble, stumbling over her melodies. Come Back Home’s synth-fuelled crescendo dominates her quiet refrain; Body struggles to inject a mid-tempo feel with vibrancy; and Cocoon promises a dancefloor hedonism, but Balbuena’s intimate delivery falters.
There are flashes of the full-throated musicality that made her an exciting prospect, but the album falls short. Perhaps hampered by a pressure to take her sound in a fresh direction, Balbuena loses the vitality that distinguished her in the first place.
