When It's Dark Out is a marked sonic improvement from his debut. When he's sharing space with someone as engaging as E-40, the holes really start to show. But when he raps, "And fuck it, I'm the coldest white rapper in the game since the one with the bleached hair," on "Calm Down" it somehow feels less like a boast and more like an admission of a shallow field. There's a certain earnestness to his writing, which focuses in on the things he wants-whether that's a Ferrari, a Grammy, or just for his grandmother to stay in her old home-and he's a very capable lyricist. Rapping and being a rapper often feel like chores for G-Eazy, and it can be a chore to listen to him. It's fitting that one of the singles is titled "Sad Boy" because that's the plainest way to express the basic idea of this record: Even something as cool as being famous can be humorless and miserable. Instead, it opts to move cautiously and without jest. His sophomore effort When It's Dark Out makes a lot of the same mistakes: This is a deliberately serious record that refuses to play to his strength, a sharply turning flow that pivots on his buoyant pronunciations, which are naturally comical. It was a decent first offering, but the music had no pulse: It was carefully dressed mannequin rap, standing stiff without feeling. His debut album, 2014's These Things Happen, articulated this identity through the prism of the sounds of the moment: mostly the sadness of Drake and somberness of Kendrick Lamar. But upon closer examination, G-Eazy isn't much like Macklemore at all in fact, he's more like Bizarro Macklemore, a self-serious, self-absorbed swag rapper who shuns the thrifty for the bourgeois. Each artist has taken each painstaking step to address his whiteness (and subsequently how that makes them outliers and commodities all at once) and they both present themselves as very for the culture, a phrase which here means aligned with conservative rap values and in tune with hip-hop culture's history and innermost workings. It's easy to write G-Eazy off as a Macklemore that simply grew up further south: He's a white indie rapper from the Bay Area who has built a sizable fan base producing the same kind of sober wordplay, one that carefully articulates individual syllables and slots them into grooves, expressing thoughts in straight lines.