In 2009, Porter Ray Sullivan’s brother, Aaron, was shot and killed during an altercation he had no stake in; when the Seattle MC’s son was born a few years later, he named him after his late sibling. Much of Watercolor, Sullivan’s airy, classicist debut, pivots between these two Aarons—one a symbol of the graveyard’s call, the other of the future’s persistence.
Up until recently, the particulars of Sullivan’s personal life have been asides in the exaggerated, smoke-session retellings of old conquests, as on the jazzy 2015 EP Nightfall. But here, for the first time, he takes the time to evaluate the tragedies that have touched his life—in addition to his brother’s killing, his father died of multiple sclerosis when Sullivan was 16, and the mother of his son recently died in a car crash. His stacks of wordy reflections can be deeply affecting, though they’re also frequently muddled by ineffective execution. More often than not, Watercolor is colorless, a feeble rendering that obfuscates a harrowing coming-of-age tale with undercooked bruiser bars. Sullivan, who bubbled to the top of his city’s talent pool by making the mundane seem luxurious with careful word choices and an eye for detail, doesn’t do his own unimaginable story justice.
To be fair, the album is tasked with doing a lot at once: putting on for an unheralded Seattle rap scene, earning the expectations that come with being an unusual signee for indie rock stalwart Sub Pop, and compressing nearly a decade of grief and introspection into a handful of tracks. Still, Sullivan often has trouble finding the right words, which can be disastrous for a rapper known for piecing sentence fragments together like a puzzle. He talks with his dad in his dreams and remembers blunted backyard bare-knuckle boxing with his brother on songs like “Past Life” and “The Mirror Between Us,” but these stories get bogged down in moment-by-moment narration that lacks his signature ability to magnify and enhance.
When Sullivan locks in, he can be a force, effortlessly threading ideas. A song like “Navi Truck,” which uses cars as totems for cherished failed loves, showcases his best scene-setting. “My Mother’s Words” turns maternal advice into a new rapper checklist: be wary of drugs, envious friends, and poisonous relationships. It’s fitting that the strongest moments come on “East Seattle,” a song that relives his coldest nights on the city’s streets, including the one when his brother was murdered. “Just try and visualize losin’ your brother/Make you wonder how it feel inside/Hearing him suffer make me wonder how it feel to die/Seeing him sleeping in his coffin and he still inside,” he raps, remembering the 911 call he made from Aaron’s phone. It’s the most gut-wrenching moment on the album.
Unfortunately, Watercolor doesn’t piece together enough of these moments. And while the productions are animated and spacious, creating openings for his jam-packed phrases, the sound doesn’t take the full step forward that would help spotlight and redefine Seattle rap. For all its wrenching inspiration, Watercolor paints an incomplete portrait of the city and struggles that made Porter Ray one of its most vocal envoys.
Correction: After publication, a family member informed us that the mother of Sullivan's child had recently died in a car crash. The article has been updated to reflect this.
