Atmosphere - Southsiders
- Written by David J. Lownds
Three years have passed since the release of The Family Sign, and Atmosphere have returned with a new full-length effort, Southsiders. Producer Ant employs guitars on several songs, and it is not the first time he’s used such instrumentation: see, for example, 2003’s ‘Trying to Find a Balance’. A great use of the tremolo effect is seen on ‘Southsiders’, while wah-wah is utilised on ‘The World Might Not Live Through The Night’ and the opener, ‘Car Thief’, on which the combination of such an effect with piano chords is reminiscent of Odd Thomas and Xperiment’s collaborative production on the title track from Braille’s Native Lungs. Elsewhere, the guitar is seen in Beatle-esque style at the end of ‘Idiot’ among other songs.
Whereas the likes of ‘Southsiders’ are a world away from the skeletal beats of the popular ‘Sunshine’, ‘Bitter’ is not, though it is slightly more textured with drums that hit almost as hard as Dr. Dre’s production on the title track from Straight Outta Compton. The seventh track on Southsiders also contains keyboard riffs, at least one of which sounds like Dre’s beats for Eminem back in the day. Elsewhere the spirit of the Californian’s productions are found in the keys-based riffs of bonus track ‘She Don’t Know Why She Love It’, a tense beat reminiscent of ‘Deep Cover’, ‘I Love You Like a Brother’, and ‘Kanye West’, which sounds like it was co-produced by its namesake and the aforementioned Doctor.
African percussion, retro synthesizers and warped bass appear on the fourth track, while ‘Bitter’, ‘Kanye West’ and the ironically heavenly ‘Hell’ are enhanced by great singing. The relatively complex musical structures and bass lines heard throughout make this album closer to rock than to traditional hip hop fare, but there’s still plenty of tracks like the pretty-but-still-bumpin’ ‘Mrs. Interpet’ that are more ‘traditional’ in this sense.
Moving onto lyrics, Slug, the rapper who has earned relatively large amounts of acclaim from some – perhaps not enough – people for his observant lyrics, flows well at times on the album but often lacks substance at least on the same great level as earlier releases Sad Clown Bad Spring 12" and the Lucy Ford EP collection. Sometimes rapping that is simultaneously great and insubstantial appears, as on the title track. At times his writing is arguably lazy… or maybe just plain poor: see for example the beginning of the hook from ‘Bitter’ which surely could have been filled with more syllables, and excessively repetitive lines like “I love you like a brother / Even though you’re not my brother”.
The greatest song on the album is ‘Flicker’, featuring another great beat and another interesting bass line that together combine with what is almost certainly Slug’s best lyric on the album. It is not coincidental that it is also definitely his most cohesive lyric. Although the stories and feelings depicted on the song and elsewhere on Southsiders are less weird and wonderful than some of Slug’s earlier work they are nonetheless personal, and such candour regarding difficult experiences that people can relate to should be celebrated in an age of shallow materialism and brutal violence, although those themes clearly do also have a place in music.
Southsiders is available from iTunes (here).