West of the US, is the West Coast. But further west, there is Hawaii. Laura Yang is from there. Nonetheless, it is actually the Californian rap scene, she is associated with; or more exactly its underground subset the DJ and producer Deeskee organized around his LA2theBay website. The rapper known as Neila made her first appearance in his entourage, when she contributed to "The Dream", the best song on his Blacklight Sessions album. And since then, she never stopped releasing music, until Analog Jewelery, in 2017.
Neila improved, over time. Her best days, ironically, happened when she struggled against a cancer impacting her vocal cords, around the year 2010. Better Late Than Never, an album supported once again by Deeskee, testifies of this.
Produced by Avatar, and more marginally by Life Rexall from the Shape Shifters, it had a good balance between sinister songs ("Snake", "Murder", "Maybe", "Anything") and joyous tracks ("Grab More", "Better Late Than Never", "Seatbelt"), which all used samples – a practice still popular on this peculiar rap scene. That album was the first the rapper had released after five years of silence, and her health conditions seemed to impact her, already. She sounded a bit like a crone, which accentuated the sadness of her lyrics, she mostly dedicated to her heartbreaks and relationship issues.
Better Late Than Never benefited from the proper support. Its most memorable moments were those with representatives from the underground network Neila was affiliated to.
Such was the case with "How It Is", an upper tempo track supported by a children choir, DJ Esp's scratches, and the raspy voice of Awol One. Such was the case, as well, with "Monster", with another semi-legend, 2Mex, and with "Earthquake", with Matre, another member of the sprawling Shape Shifters collective. The main dish, though, was the conclusive "Mercy Refused", a relentless posse cut with a dozen (or more) underground figures such as Existereo, Xololanxinxo, Project Blowed veteran Volume 10, and even, straight from the East Coast, Bigg Jus from Company Flow.
Beyond Neila's own case, this track looked like a swansong for what used to be a huge and promising underground scene. By then, it had lost its shine; critics were no longer interested. For the Hawaiian rapper, though, this was one more step: the next album, titled accurately Only This One Counts and marked by her distress and health condition, would prove to be her most intimate and her most intense.
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