Minnesota Snowmen, Slug & Ant or “Atmosphere”…
In-between full length album release’s, these Minnesota Men have been creating and releasing six or seven song long Ep’s. Lately they have been dropping albums as the season’s change… and naming them accordingly; “Sad Clown Bad Winter 11…” and “Sad Clown Bad Spring 12″ to name a few. The first track “Less One” on the Spring album is by far one of the best Hip-Hop/Dub type Reggae infusion tracks I’ve ever heard.
This album would be 13th in the series, perhaps Sluggo is a bit superstitious..?????
This albums title is “Leak At Will…” It Came out July 9th, 2009 on Rhymesayers Entertainment independent label, has seven tracks, and is only about 20 minutes short… A few different subjects and emotions are touched on in this Ep and it sounds like a project that took time, thought, and effort… not just something that was thrown together real quick to make that almighty dollar. Usually Slug rhymes in first person, telling stories of his time spent in dive bars and hungover in strangers bedrooms… This Ep was told more out of the 3rd person perspective…like he was a narrator or story teller of situations he observed.
The first track titled “C-mon” is about a kid growing up as a “Class Clown” that left grease spots on the black board…who loves Graffiti, and living on the South Side of Minneapolis. As he grew up, he strays from the gangs and the bad shit he sees all over his neighborhood. The production almost sounds like it has a Led Zepplin influence and samples of the phrase, “C’mon” is chanted at least 50 times in this little gem.
The second track is titled, “They Always Know…” The production and emotions of the song play off of each other beautifully in this song. It is a quick and simple song not even two minutes in length. It is about a girl on a bus ride headed out of a town where everybody knew everything about everybody, and they all gossiped to the point where she had to move out of the town just to get away from a ‘friend with benefits’ that was around every corner. It is a song that reminds me of the fact that sometimes life is just like a Soap Opera on television and the only way to avoid it is to turn the T.V off, or in this woman’s case, move the fuck outta the town to get away from the drama.
Track 3 is called “The Ropes..” It’s about a kid in High School learning “The Ropes” to survive…he talks about how he learns street smarts from music and movies…he talks about how the rich kids he went to school with hustled drugs for excitement, while he did it to eat…This track has a cool bass line, but the music in the background sounds as if it was sampled in the produce section of the local Safeway….or maybe an elevator in the business district.
The 4th track is probably my favorite track on the album as far as lyrics go… it’s all about how wack television is…it reminds me of Aesop Rock’s “Basic Cable” track on the Float album…It’s an anti-television song …which Slug states that “It’s on ” everywhere; it goes from jail to the bar, the tour bus, everywhere he travels to, even South Korea. It has a snippet from KRS at the end of the track, which quotes the famous commercial “This is your brain on drugs” The production on this track is too simple and has nothing that makes it stand out as being an ill track.
Track 5 is “Feel good hit of the Summer” This song, Slug just states his opinion of pretty much every drug out there, and he states that, out of all of them, he is “Probably addicted to coffee, cigarettes, and sex” The production sounds like a baseline with grandmas jewelry box fully wound and playing in the background. He discusses the positive and negative aspects of all these drugs…and how they are made in a shack somewhere with the proper amounts of laundry detergent.
The 2nd to last track “Mother’s Day…” Slug proves that he can touch on subjects other than drinking, being hungover, having threesomes with groupies, & filtered menthol cigarettes. The production consists of a smooth ass baseline, accompanied by an upright bass & calming wind chimes. This track is about a single mother that worked two jobs to keep her kids living in a good neighborhood. The track is gloomy and depressing, with production and baseline to match… as he tells about how the oldest brother died from pneumonia and her youngest boy was in prison. It switches from the view of the mother to the feelings of the oldest boy, making collect calls from prison. It proves that Slug can pull off songs of serious emotions if he feels inspired to do so…
The last track…”Milie fell off of the fire escape” is about a girl named “Milie’ who robs a department store, throws the gun away, and starts running through the neighborhood to get away from the police. She bobs between houses and hops fences, and runs to the industrial part of town to try and elude the police. She plans on hiding in the empty warehouses till the police disappear. She begins to have second thoughts about turning herself in, since she would be a first time offender. The police spot her as she is climbing up a fire escape, they shout to her “Millie turn yourself in now girl, come down from there” …but she looses grip of the fire escape and falls to her death. The production consists of a piano sample, some female chanting, and what almost sounds like a Jimi Hendrix guitar riff mixed in.
The cover of this album has Slug on the front dressed up as ‘Good Ole Uncle Sam’. Must have been a snap shot from Halloween or a 4th of July school play. On a whole, the album is worth a listen…Slug has mellowed in his years and it is reflected in his music. Usually Slug has a few comical tracks where he clowns on certain subjects and makes me laugh a bit, this album contained none of those. The album is a little bit more on the serious tip and he only mentions his son once on the track about television…he says that the television “It’s on” when he wakes him up. Thank God he did not mention Lucy once on this Ep.
Look for Slug’s 3rd installment of the “Felt” series with his boy Murs, formerly of “Living Legends”, now on Definitive Jux label, and Aesop Rock on production (who is also on Def Jux) It is supposed to drop sometime in the middle of November on Rhymesayer’s Entertainment independent label….

-Voldemars

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3. Hip-Hop: Del and Tame One “Parallel Uni-Verses”…
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