In an industry filled with fakers, it’s easy to regard Rhymesayers Entertainment as a bulwark, with Minneapolis-based heavyweights — Sean “Slug” Daley and Anthony “Ant” Davis — hawking the parapet. Yet audiences, once smitten with the meticulously-crafted When Life Gives You Lemons, are left puzzling over Family Sign — Atmosphere’s regrettably two-dimensional sixth studio album. Sure, it’s a thought-provoking affair, if slightly cerebral, but Slug’s wearied swagger spoils its pace, exchanging the duo’s trademark spontaneity for a paralyzing sense of calculation.
Family Sign begins with “My Key,” a downtempo opener teeming with malaise. Like a handful of tracks on the album, it eschews form, subsisting on sparse rhymes and melodies that, while minimalist, never quite cohere as one.
Yet Slug gradually enriches the bare bones muscality of “My Key” over “The Last to Say” and “Became,” mustering When Life Gives You Lemons’s lovely introspection to access more heartfelt realms of existence.
Family Sign kicks into high gear with the funked-out “Just For Show,” a tune that could’ve been plucked straight from Seven’s Travels’s punchy tracklist.
It’s weak-pulsed, yes, but Slug’s trademark poeticism has an invigorating effect, helping his doddering rhymes regain the same sauciness that first sent shockwaves through the hip-hop circuit.
“Guess that it just wasn’t meant to be our destiny / It’s upsetting, see, I gave you the best of me,” Slug spits bitterly. “All my friends are like, just let her leave / So go ahead and pretend I set you free.”
Yet Slug’s spirited delivery swiftly loses momentum over the course of “She’s Enough” and “Bad Bad Daddy” — two unpolished and incomprehensibly off-kilter tracks that interrupt Family Sign’s fluid narrative. “Though it’s perhaps a relief to those yearning for a bit of levity on the project, the production and hook are both an absolute mess,” writes HipHopDX’s Slava Kuperstein. “Think of the song as ‘You’ with awful execution.”
This clumsiness persists with spaced-out melodies of “Millenium Dodo” and the haphazardly thrown together “Who I’ll Never Be” and “I Don’t Need Brighter Days.” Yet Slug, ambling forward, quickly recovers with the quirky “Ain’t Nobody” and “Your Name Here” — two tracks recalling Atmosphere’s unreleased, if quietly evocative, Sad Clown dubs.
Still, audiences are left missing Slug’s old-school braggadocio, dozing through “If You Can Save Me Now,” a catastrophic faceplant barely redeemed by Family Sign’s poignant closers. Yet “Something So” and “My Notes,” knit together by faint stringwork and glittering glissandos, marries Atmosphere’s newfound fragility with eloquence.
“Your first breath wasn’t easy to find / So you signified the mountain you climbed / By lettin’ out a warrior’s cry and it sounded like mine / Now everybody hold up the family sign,” Slug breathes, seething with vulnerability.
Navigating a sea of static scratches and blunted melodies produced by Anthony “Ant” Davis’s turntable, Daley spits stories of love, anger and survival that tremble — and sometimes threaten to burst — with verve.
Yet, as Raghav Mehta of Minnesota Daily puts it, the album both “doesn’t boast enough redeeming qualities to warrant repeated listens,” and “collapses in a 50-minute mess of minimalistic clunk and clatter.”
While, in Slug’s words, Family Sign’s lyricism “metaphorically [touches] on themes of fatherhood, loss, love, disappointment and jubilation,” its shaky constitution doesn’t match up.
One is left to hope that the Minneapolis-based hit-makers are merely undergoing a metamorphosis from which they will quickly emerge, well-rested.
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