Broke panda is broke…

[Video][Myspace]
[6.75]

Hillary Brown: As in Philip? There are some analogies one could make, but mostly it’s that this song has a similar crystalline sound (i.e., both it and the works of the big-deal composer embody their names to some extent). Not exactly catchy, but quite good all the same.
[6]

Erick Bieritz: Pill’s “Trap Goin’ Ham” video roughly fit with fellow Atlantian Young Jeezy’s trap subject matter, but “Glass” turns the same urban fixation to a different end. Both mainstream rappers like Jeezy and backpackers give lip service to hip-hop’s conflicted feelings about street life, but Pill’s terse, somber verses, while by no means unprecedented, don’t feel like platitudes. Burying the chorus under a mess of urban noise – from sirens to barking dogs to a respirator – adds to the sense of rap vérité, and even if such a characterization sounds corny, nothing in this song does, which is impressive.
[8]

Alfred Soto: Tablas and lazy drawl evoke that “Big Pimpin’ vibe, the crowd noise summons “Living for the City.” This is no “Trap Goin’ Ham,” but it’s a damn sight sharper than Drake and Kid Cudi.
[6]

Pete Baran: I was waiting for a decent dénouement to this audio movie with sound effects a-go-go, but the song lacks a third act. You can’t build demand for a sequel just by leaving part one unfinished. An unfinished travesty.
[3]

John Seroff: “Glass” is arranged as a cinematic; jammed with “you-are-there” street sounds of barking dogs, sirens, rolling dice, car alarms, idle corner chatter, phlegmy coughing, spraycan rattles, gunfire both far off and close up and the rhythmic shatter of the eponymous glass in a unrelenting, unredeemable urban metronome. This ambience and multi-track percussion gives the song grit; the children’s choir lends gravity and Pill provides the Jean Valjean narrative that’s light on pride or braggadocio and long on regret. It’s solid, well-crafted hip hopera; savvy enough to offhandedly compare liquor stores to cops and smart enough to end a compact three minutes on a hearbeat, not a flatline. Pill is hardly blazing new territory, but he is expert and exact.
[8]

Renato Pagnani: I know that the shattering glass which marks every bar provides the song with its namesake, but the sample wears thin over three minutes, partly because it sounds like one of those GarageBand presets, all tinny and weak, like dropping one of those little pocket mirrors girls use to check their makeup instead of the impact of a Hummer acquainting itself with a 14×18 storefront window at sixty clicks an hour. The sample’s a part of the beat’s concept, not the song’s, and overall this is a missed opportunity for Pill to push his introspective, somewhat derivative drawl into novel places.
[5]

Chuck Eddy: Now I feel sorry for every time I’ve compared a recent rap song to “Mind Playing Tricks On Me” — Pill comes closer here to pulling off that kind of ghetto blues than anybody I’ve heard in a dog’s age. And he reminds me that “The Message” was actually a recession song, too. But as Barbara Ehrinreich spelled out in the NY Times last month, much of black America was already deep into a recession before the current one happened. So call this a depression song, in more ways than one. And every element — the ethereal vocal sample repeating itself into some eerie kind of religious chant, the subtle but insistent Afro-Caribbean drumbeat, Pill’s diction and details, the audio verite street-chase scene and barking dogs in the middle, a video (just like the one for “Trap Goin’ Ham”) that could double as a neighborhood documentary — feeds into the whole. So if this is just a cornball social consciousness mood piece that evaporates from the head when it’s not playing, which on some level it is, it’s still a really ambitious one. Guy’s a major talent, isn’t he?
[8]

Matt Cibula: On first listen, it’s pretty standard “conflicted drug dealer trapped-in-the-life” stuff. On second listen, you hear the true pain in his voice and the coiled violence in the beat. On third listen, you vow to burn down the system that would allow people — nay, force people — to live in this kind of world.
[9]

Martin Skidmore: I like Pill on this: he sounds tough and reflectively enduring, and this suggests the broader potential for a good career, though it isn’t as wildly OTT and endearing as his last one, and it sags a bit in places.
[7]

Rodney J. Greene: Pill is probably my favorite new rapper of this year, and I get the feeling that he just needs a push here to go hard as hell. His hunger is evident, but the maudlin and motionless track lets him down. He needs a beat to which he can react.
[5]

Jonathan Bradley: “Glass” loses the apocalyptic frenzy of Pill’s previous Jukebox fave “Trap Goin’ Ham” and replaces it with a paralyzed nuclear winter horror. The kinetic rhythm rolling underneath and the high, hymn-like chant over it lends a peacefulness to Pill’s tableaux, but this is uncompromising trap-as-a-trap rap; drug dealing results only in stasis for seller and buyer. “Please, get me up off this corner, I can’t see myself leave/Stuck in this world of crack-smoking hoes on their knees,” the rapper begs, but his hell is mundane, too, a familiar world of family men, traffic and corner stores.
[8]

Jordan Sargent: Like pre-pop T.I., Pill is less concerned with wowing you with lyrical acrobatics than he is with making you feel -— his hood, his people, his pain and, at times, his optimism. “Glass” isn’t as arresting as “Trap Goin Ham” but it further carves out a place for Pill as a worthy young documentarian, someone who not only refuses a Band-Aid but willingly opens and displays wounds. “Trap Goin Ham” showed that he can do pop -— or something close to it -— and “Glass” proves that his album tracks will be nearly as engrossing.
[8]