Slaughterhouse Slaughterhouse LP
It seems like you can't go to any hip hop blog page or website without seeing the name Slaughterhouse plastered all over it. While the claims by some that this "supergroup" are here to save hip hop are a little bit far fetched they certainly do have the potential to make some noise in an era where it seems real rap is dying a very slow and painful death and tight jean wearing autoners are running amok.
Can the team of Joe Budden, Crooked I, Royce da 5-9 and Joel Ortiz breathe new life into it or maybe more importantly survive the dreaded first week sales numbers to be able to stick around long enough for them to make an impression.
While a certain member of the group has spent his time recently caught up in a situation with the Wu Tang Clan I'm going to focus here purely on the music at hand as the antics surrounding the album's release have possibly caused more hype then the album itself so with that being said let's get down to business.
The album starts off pretty well with "Sound Off" which has the group switching up their rhyme patterns with reasonable success over a familar sample (i can't quite place it though) but immediately takes a backward step with lackluster hooks on the next two tracks and this seems to be a problem throughout the album.
While the verses all display superior worldplay, witty punchlines and clever cadences the problem with having four mcs all hungry for mictime is you sometimes get an overload of bars which is what happened with this project. The album goes from solid tracks such as "Pray (it's a shame)" to the just plain awful "Cuckoo". "Salute" is a solid track but among all the songs on the album I failed to find any single track that really jumped out at me and you would think that a combination of Slaughterhouse and Alchemist would produce something a little more inspiring then the bland "Microphone".
The album also struggles with finding any cohesiveness partly due to the amount of different producers and ends up sounding more like a compilation of tracks then a proper album.
With all that being said there is enough here to please the hip hop head like i said before the wordplay and punchlines are solid and all worthy of the rewind button treatment they're not bad when they get more personal and introspective either such as on tracks like "Rain Drops" .
But considering the hype surrounding this project it really didn't live up to it's billing and could've been so much better. I would've preferred if they had split the tracks among them and maybe brought in a few more collabos as the ones they do have are abit ordinary and sometimes just plain unnessary (is it still cool to have Fatman Scoop on the hook?) then it may have been a little easier on the ear. As it is you have four rappers who all have the tendancy to go on rapping for endless bars but have to pack that into a smaller verse to acomodate each other which really doesn't work.
So the first week numbers are in and they aren't good but surely that was somewhat to be expected in this day and age. We'll have to see how Joe Budden's project "Escape Route" fairs in this current climate only I can't help but think that releasing your solo project in conjunction with your group effort was somewhat of a conflict of interest i guess Joey didn't see it that way.
3/5
- DJ Ruthless
Related Links:
© ukhh.com 1999 - 2009
