Rap, like all genres, thrives on the versatility of its artists, each artist falling into certain niches and expanding within their own perimeters. There are those who rap about rapping, those who ponder the meaning of life, and those who pontificate on the finer points of baseball. In the case of Atmosphere and their newest record, Seven's Travels, one thing is immediately apparent: Slug likes to rap about girls.
Though Slug started out as a rapper's rapper on Atmosphere's 1997 debut, Overcast! (then with fellow emcee Spawn), it wasn't until the Slug-centric Lucy Ford EPs that Sean Daley made a pivotal query: Why stress multi-syllabic rhymes and true-school sensibility when you can lazily rap about the same thing on every song, keep your existing fanbase and exponentially increase your stable of groupies? It's worked well for him since-- at least from a short-term careerist standpoint-- but what remains to be seen is how long he can continue successfully milking the formula.
From the sound of Seven's Travels, probably not much longer. Here, Slug tries to create the illusion of diverse subject matter by packaging each track differently. Unfortunately, his shallow agenda couldn't be clearer: In personifying an escaped bird as both a girl and a symbol of the American government ("Bird Sings Why the Caged I Know"), dating girls with low self-esteem ("Good Times [Sick Pimpin']"), hitting up girls backstage on tour ("Cats Van Bags"), and trying to get with girls in unconventional places ("Shoes"), Slug plays the role of both the modern misogynist and the sensitive coffee date as a means of appealing to both sexual demographics. It's through this hollow and obvious ploy for universal appreciation that Slug truly lives up to his alias.
Occasionally, though, Slug unearths his old cleverness; on "Cats Van Bags", he's "navigating through a basement that masquerades as a nation/ Practicing [his] acetate masturbation," and effortlessly dropping elaborate disses: "there's more said between the lines of your forehead/ Than they could ever try to fine print on the inside of that warhead." But problems even crop up on the album's highlight, "Always Coming Back Home to You". Slug opens the track people-watching, but loses control of the narrative when a nervous kid ditches a gun with him, and he jumps, from out of nowhere, to "the clouds ran away, opened up the sky/ And one by one, I watched every constellation die." It doesn't help that he takes the song out singing like a stunted Everlast.
The production is a concern, too, since nothing says hit-or-miss better than the words "produced by Ant." Ant pulled off a masterful cascade of 70s soul sampling earlier this year with Brother Ali's Shadows on the Sun but very few beats here are on that level. Maybe Slug is to blame for the beat selection, but instead of the smooth loops and hard, clean percussion of the Brother Ali record, we're treated to Ant's trademark abrasive snare drum and urgent, irritating sample chopping. Beats like the lazy drum loop dub of "Shoes" and the incredibly lame didgeridoo and whistle show (somewhere, Prince Paul is crying) on "National Disgrace" make for a less than magnificent aural experience. Some exceptions stand-- particularly the fuzz-guitar funk/punk seesaw of "Cats Van Bags" and the sizzling 70s soul tidal wave of "Denvemolorado"-- but even then they're on, there's usually something to bring them down: on "Denvemolorado", Slug raps for one minute and sings the same refrain for another, destroying what could've stood as one of his best songs.
The core problem with Seven's Travels is that Slug seems to have forgotten just what helped him lead his niche to begin with. The subject matter here is repetitive, pseudo-intellectual pandering runs rampant, pointless skits and mid-song dialogue sessions interrupt the flow, and most importantly, wasted beats fall at the hands of Slug's newfound penchant for verse-long tracks and poorly realized singsong bridges. At their worst, Slug's emotionally "deep" lyrics threaten Dashboard Confessional's Chris Carrabba for the title of King of the Self-Important Youth. He should seek the conceptual balance of labelmate Brother Ali and rediscover the highly playable discourse of his former incarnation.
