As listeners, there’s a natural concern for Malcolm, but there’s also a natural attraction to such brink-of-life music.
In the storm of this mixtape, he never lets us forget that, at the time, he is just a 22-year-old guy trying to get his mind right. Mac vacillates between emotional peaks but his rapping is at its best. He’s getting higher than we’ve previously heard about, celebrating his success with a variety of drugs while documenting the difficult descents from riding so high. In a swirl of jazz, Mac begins by proclaiming that he should have died already, establishing Faces as a confession. Across the 24 tracks, Mac covers damn near everything within the scope of the human condition, resulting in his most expansive, challenging, esoteric, flawed, and affecting offering to his career at this point. The mixtape is a paranoid stumbling through the cocaine ether, the perceived fragility of mortality, and the anxiety of only knowing how to create, not necessarily how to live. It may well have taught me that the purpose of great writing is to elevate the person receiving it. My favorite Mac project, it was the soundtrack to my self-harm, the darkest period of my life, and the consequential soundtrack to my recovery. This is a lesson I learned from Mac Miller time and again, but most crucially from his 2014 opus, Faces.
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