Through their respective work with The Pharcyde and Jurassic 5, Slimkid3 and DJ Nu-Mark have cemented themselves as two members associated with groups inextricably linked to Golden Era Hip Hop. While Nu-Mark has briefly stepped out of the J5 spotlight with freelance production work and his 2012 solo project Broken Sunlight, this marks the closest thing Slimkid3 has come to a proper, solo release. After traveling in the same geographical and artistic circles for a while, the pair now hook up for a new collaboration on their self-titled album Slimkid3 & Nu-Mark.
Nu-Mark brings it on this album, and his partner in crime has the challenge of living up to the high standards the former’s been setting since an early 2000s single that had mainstream success. Most fans who don’t know Nu-Mark deeply will still be familiar with his classic Jurassic 5 song “What’s Golden.” That beat acts as a good introduction for DJ Nu-Mark’s sound here, because he uses more instances of those sample-heavy, minimally processed musical accompaniments. The panning vocals on the outro of “Fade To Black” are about the most complex stereo-world trickery that you’ll find here. The musical ideas and live instrument samples that Nu-Mark has chosen are instead what’s supposed to draw the listener in.
That’s exactly what happens on the song “What Are Words For” and its searching piano bass line. The title’s sentiment of such a poetic idea clearly stands out as deserving a lot of thought and consideration in an art form that gravitates so much around words and their functions. Slimkid3’s hook, “Why don’t you hear me when I’m talking to you?” emotionally grabs the listener by not identifying specifically who Slimkid is trying to get to hear him.
On a cameo-heavy track, “Bouillon,” Slimkid even has the game to run with two bigger names. Raps with external, two-syllable rhymes would be right at home in the work of even Murs or Del: “Now I’m DIY shit, I know who I am son / Take it to the hole with control, get a and-one / Take what I deserve without the help of a hand gun.” His movement from one rhyme to the next, when he flips each one across the bar line to the start of the next sentence, seems more planned out here. This kind of consistency, mixed with just the amount of right variation, needs to be found more often in his work.
Slimkid3’s basic problem throughout the album is that he lets his rhymes dictate where his poetic content goes, and doesn’t have the proficiency to tell whatever story he wants while fitting it inside clever rhyme schemes. On “Let Me Hit,” his references and images veer into the nonsensical, which Slimkid3 himself seems to admit.
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“Now she the type to get you hype right behind the speaker / Or she the undercover type substitute teacher, I don’t know,” he rhymes. Metaphors, similes, and images come across as flat or sometimes trite in lines from “I Know Didn’t I” like, “She used to blow me awake like a gale force,” or, “I used to live like a prince, but never the king / In the castle you in girl, I gave you the ring / Now that made you the queen above everything.”
The former Pharcyde emcee still excels at the rapping/singing hybrid style best exemplified by his work on songs like “Otha Fish.” But the inconsistency in the booth does cause the album to lag at times. In short, this means that as Nu-Mark goes, so does this album.
“Bom Bom Fiya” is unexpected in the best of ways, as the sample is three bars long instead of the omnipresent lengths of one, two or four bars that are found in 95% of other Rap music. This leads to song sections of six or 12 bars, instead of the ubiquitous 16-bar verse and eight-bar chorus. When the beats are killer, such as with “Godzilla or Gamera” and its creeping piano arpeggios, then the album is really enjoyable. But when the beats fall flat—such as with the awkwardly inserted, filtered synth sounds of “Fade To Black”—then the album stumbles. Another expansion and evolution of Nu-Mark’s style that isn’t quite pulled off well is “I Know Didn’t I,” when the hi-hat on the beat is beatboxed. The problem is that that is the only beatboxed element of the entire beat, and so it sticks out a little too much in the listener’s ear.
Although it’s a style that may have had its heyday in previous eras, the grainy soul vocals from Darondo on “I Know Didn’t I” and its ilk will always have their proper place in Rap. The problem is that this album isn’t a shining example of that kind of Hip Hop anyway, as it would have to be in order to really stand out in a style that has been done so often. In the end, its nostalgic but not particularly progressive, making for a solid but not spectacular project.
