When a rapper and a producer collaborate on an album, it’s usually the beat maker who is working in service of the MC, humbly delivering a metronomic base tailored to the rhymes. This isn’t the case for Gate 13, which teams up two Bay Area fixtures, rapper Del the Funky Homosapien and producer Amp Live (formerly of the crew Zion I), and adjusts the formula so that Amp Live’s funk-forward beats dominate the listening experience.
Del’s cartoonish brogue remains one of the warmest, most likable voices in hip-hop. Throughout the album, he raps more economically than he has in the past, and this concise style allows his imagery to shine. Over the powerful snares of “Run Free,” he recounts a caper that finds the narrator chasing his foes onto a fire escape. “They tried to climb down to the fourth floor,” he raps at the story’s climax. “My posse shoot ’em down, now they skydiving.” On “Wheel of Fortune,” he takes out inferior MCs like he's playing a video game: “I know some kung fu/Tiger style, crane style, they gonna get pummeled/Down, down, left, left, punch/That shit’s fire all around.”
But it’s Amp Live’s production that makes Gate 13 distinctive. The short opener, “Attention (Intro),” is like an overture: Deep, squelching bass tones, melodic keys, and spacey ambient effects set a future-funk mood for the album. Clipped snares and sci-fi synths follow on “Wheel of Fortune”—but after a minute of bubbling into a groove, the song slows to a reggae tempo for a short instrumental passage before seamlessly transitioning back to its original sound. Del’s voice is present, but it’s the instrumental soundscape that dictates the shifts in mood.
The album is full of inspired hip-hop production like this, with beats that transform throughout individual tracks, rather than just locking into a trusty boom-bap rhythm. “Run Free” showcases bass tones and drum patterns that recall, at various moments, Run-D.M.C.’s “Here We Go (Live at the Funhouse),” Dead Prez's “Hip-Hop,” and N.W.A.'s “Dopeman,” without plagiarizing them. Amp Live subtly adds and removes hi-hats throughout the melancholic “The Glow,” building and then slowing the track’s momentum. The introduction of a squiggly synth riff heightens the drama of Del and guest rapper Eligh’s most braggadocious lines in “On the Ball,” in which Del warns sucker MCs, “It’s easy to catch a rat/Just put some cheese on the trap/Shipwrecked, they wanna raft/’Bout to take a piranha bath.”
It seems appropriate that Amp Live gets the final word on Gate 13, with “Lateral Thinking,” an instrumental track that begins with monstrous, noisy wobble bass tones straight out of a free-jazz jam, then lets celestial synths smooth the way to mellow guitar lines and a rolling 808 beat. When the album closes by fading to static, it’s as if the beat maker is pulling the plug on his own dynamic creation. Del may be the MC in this duo, but Amp Live’s production speaks just as loudly as the rhymes.
