Eternia & MoSS "At Last" Album Review

While I'm waiting for The Smoking Section to post my review of Eternia & MoSS' latest release, At Last, I figured I'd post it on here for everyone to peep. Enjoy and grab a copy of the album!

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For every hip-hop luminary that masters the genre and provides hit after critical, popular hit, there are bottom-feeder rappers who could fill silos with their respective clichés. White, female, auto-tone—these are just a few of the labels that have been designated as career-killing scarlet letters that inevitably create more acrimony than ascension for the MCs who embody them. However, there are the rare exceptions that personify one—if not several—of these categories and rise well above the lowest rung of rap’s food chain. Silk-Anne Semiramis Dawn Craig Kaya, or more commonly known as Eternia, is white, female and Canadian—but she has also released one of the best and emotionally laced underground hip-hop albums of the year with her latest project, At Last.

The Ottawa-based lyricist teams with underground producer MoSS to craft 15 tracks of pure verbal warfare, allowing MoSS’ boom-bap scratching to play the perfect backdrop to Eternia’s often vitriolic bars. On tracks like the opener “Any Man,” Eternia rips off lines like, “when I see you walk on my spot, I swear I’ll burn you/see you try to rock, dude, I will hurt you/talk shit to E, believe me, I heard you/but you don’t matter no more, you don’t matter no more,” as if the album were simply a recorded series of her best battle-ready raps. Sticking with this theme throughout the first half of the record, Eternia uses an almost masculine bravado to go toe-to-toe with Joell Ortiz on “It’s Funny” and waxes poetic with female hip-hop royalty Rah Digga and Lady of Rage on “BBQ.”

However, it’s the intense subject matter packaged into the second half of the album that gives At Last its salience. Dealing with issues ranging from a dead-beat, abusive father to a dysfunctional family life to alcoholism, Eternia combines the lyrical boisterousness of the first half of the album with a relatable earnestness. On “The Half,” Eternia relays an Cain-and-Abel-like story of her half and actual brothers over MoSS’s chilly, haunted beat, saying, “they were on year apart, more or less a few months/one knew he was loved, the other not so much/that hurts more than any bullet from a gun.” And the deceiving title of “Mr. Bacardi” isn’t a joyous ode to the Puerto Rican rum’s legacy, but rather the MC’s struggle against its intoxicating and addictive nature. Personifying that 151, Eternia’s Stockholm Syndrome is obvious with, “I’m never tongue-tied when I see ya/I can walk a straight line every time I can meet ya… God I meant it when I said I love the way you feel and I need ya/that’s how you got me now I am lost in your features.”

But even with the heavy subject matter and verbal gymnastics, redundancy becomes a problem and the last three tracks (“Day In the Life,” “Catch Me” and “Goodbye”) all come off as superfluous copies of the album’s first half. With the raw, brash nature of both Eternia’s lyrics and MoSS’ production, a tighter and shorter album would’ve served the album well, keeping listeners alert, but not inundating them with déjà vu.

Regardless, At Last thrives where many in Eternia’s same spot have so often failed. Gripping and ostensibly lyrical, the MC never gets tongue-tied because she has something that the other failures do not—honesty.