Deem Spencer, a mousy 22-year-old rapper from Jamaica, Queens who coos his lyrics, makes music for the over-thinkers. There aren’t any traces of the historic Queens of hip-hop yore in the verses he intones. He’s blissfully unconcerned with NYC rap lore and restoring the feeling. Picking out his raps can be like catching conversation fragments from someone just barely within earshot, beneath the buzzing murmur in a restaurant. His songs exist in the cracks between the mundane and profound, ruminating on—sometimes through—the everyday struggles of being young and moving forward. He is in search of both the perfectly articulated thought and feeling. “You gotta be more expressive than you are impressive,” he said last year. Oddly enough, expressiveness has been a problem for the hopeless romantic. His small voice, often obscured to the point of being indistinct in song, has a tendency to be swallowed up in his big ideas. Pretty Face is a rectification, not so much in volume as in the sheer impact of sonic material. Even when his voice is nearly imperceptible here his presence is still palpable. Read more on Last.fm. User-contributed text is available under the Creative Commons By-SA License; additional terms may apply.