Familiarity is both a blessing and a crutch for Spillage Village, a collective of vocalists and producers steeped in the folklore of Atlanta’s most prestigious rap acts. Their latest album Spilligion is a polished record full of rumbling basslines, posse cuts, and gospel interludes, with songs assuming loose themes of love, faith, family, and weed. The rappers spin yarns of fellowship and strife, like wayfarers commiserating around a campfire—a style reminiscent of Goodie Mob, OutKast, and blues stretching back some 200 years. Still, at times, the familiarity functions as shorthand; their success is hinged largely on whether devotees of Aquemini and Still Standing feel like making room in their disc-changers for a crew of next-gen disciples.
Spillage Village seems to understand what makes Dungeon Family transcendent, that their essence can’t be condensed to a vibe. But viewed through the prism of a Dreamville Records project, Spilligion can be representative of the label’s reductive homages. J. Cole has bankrolled a slew of underappreciated revival acts, including Spillage members EarthGang and J.I.D—both of whom released strong full-lengths upon signing to the label in 2017. That fall, Charlotte rapper Lute, another adherent of Dungeon Family’s blunted rumination, delivered the excellent West 1996 Pt. 2 to little fanfare. While Spilligion adheres to Dreamville’s reverent aesthetic, Cole’s long-running attempts to compress the most intricate elements of hip-hop’s turn-of-the-century blockbusters are evident in his protégés’ work.
Ambiance does most of Spilligion’s heavy lifting. Most of the tracks have multiple production credits, usually a combination of in-house producers Hollywood JB, Christo, Olu, and Benji. Their subterranean rhythms, bright guitar chords, and funky digressions recall Organized Noize not only in the abstract but also in their structural subtleties. On “Mecca,” the high percussion assumes the foreground, the background instrumentals slinking left to right in stereo. The danceable groove of “Cupid” ends with a jazzy keyboard outro, the programmed drums nimbly switched out for a live set. Big Rube, the spoken-word standby of Dungeon Family projects since Southernplayalisticadillacmuzik, appears not once but twice on Spilligion.
“PsalmSing” and “Shiva” have hooks that take advantage of Spillage’s varied personnel, who each chime in with enveloping harmonies. Mereba, a prodigious neo-soul singer who also raps with icy precision, is Spilligion’s breakout star, her voice threaded through the soaring choruses. The album’s most jaw-dropping moment—and there are several—is the outro “Jupiter,” on which the assembled believers make merry in spite of an uncertain future: “So hold my hands and dance with me tonight/You know they say we’re all about to die.” It’s a moment of rapturous if fleeting contentment.
Still, there’s a tonal indistinctness that dulls the highs on an album that’s nominally about religion. Contrasted with Dungeon Family’s backwoods mysticism, Spilligion’s down-home Christianity limits its depth and thematic heft, and the verses can feel a bit paint-by-numbers when bookended by such sharp hooks. On “Ea’alah (Family),” which advocates interspersing prayer with smoke breaks, J.I.D bursts with gratitude: “Let me look into the sun, ’cause I don’t got no occupation/You can say I came from nothin’ but I found my destination.” Later in the song, Olu tackles the coronavirus pandemic: “I don’t mean to bother you, well yeah, I kinda do/See, we’ve been wrestlin’ with this nasty plague that’s kinda like the flu.” (It isn’t.) The brightness isn’t offputting, but it’s a long way from, say, Soul Food, an album about four young men surveying their earthly lots and invoking a God who didn’t always seem to love them back. Once you’re convinced of your own absolution, you don’t need to wander the desert looking for it.
Longtime Spillage member J.I.D is one of rap’s feel-good stories, an industrious veteran who transformed himself into a technical marvel through sheer will. A master of breath control and syllable placement, his erratically pitched vocals embolden his rhyme schemes, and Spilligion shows he’s equally adept at carrying a tune. He’s still coming into his own: his verse on “Baptize” (“She said it’s cold inside, that water made her nipples hard/That’s that liquor talkin’, sippin’ gin and readin’ the book of Genesis just before”) reflects the lustiness and overtaxed semantics of a J. Cole tangent, and at times his inflection is indistinguishable from Kendrick Lamar’s.
EarthGang’s Olu and WowGr8, for their part, have worked to avoid the fate of Nappy Roots and Big K.R.I.T.—genre artists who recognized their market position and rapped prolifically about grits and Eldorados over banjos and harmonicas. Rapping in animated fusillades, EarthGang’s deviation between conversational deliveries and idiosyncratic singing evokes Stankonia-era André 3000, and their scope has increased as they’ve refined their mechanics. For all its strengths, though, Spilligion sounds telegraphed in comparison to 2019’s Mirrorland, their elaborate world-building diminished by the big-group setting. When J.I.D and the other Spillagers assume frontman duties, as on “Judas,” the project’s vibrant theatrics and space-age symbolism are most conspicuously absent.
If there’s one thing the extended Spillage family shares, it’s an intense devotion to craft, which makes Spilligion an achievement. The absorbing full-length is a testament to the octet’s infectious spirit and remarkable technique. But even if no one expects Spillage to replicate “Inshallah” or “7th Floor/The Serengetti,” the miracle of Dungeon Family lay in their audacity to journey without a map. Like any camp revival, Spilligion offers a raucous, affirming experience that leaves you craving a deliverance you’d already sought.
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