The Elephant Man’s Bones was a real occasion album—a long-rumored, extremely anticipated assembly of two hip-hop legends. It delivered on the hype in shocking trend: a minimalist opus that shivered and smoldered greater than it slapped. Although it bore the stylistic markings of its creators, Roc Marciano and the Alchemist, the album felt distinct of their respective catalogs. As a substitute of mangled soul loops and hard-edged boom-bap, this was mafioso rap tuned by Tibetan singing bowls; Al offered a pineal gland-stimulating airiness via which Marci floated just like the ghost of a kingpin. Two years later, after attending to their solo careers, Al and Marci return with The Skeleton Key, a weirder, bleaker, extra hermetically sealed tackle status road rap. There’s no bloat, no company, and no superfluous sounds. Every of its 10 songs looks like peering round a darkish nook, an inescapable menace saturating each second.
After discovering a collective voice with The Elephant Man’s Bones, the pair settled into a cushty rhythm, capitalizing on a long-simmering creative connection. “We all the time making music,” Marci defined to Rolling Stone. “I’m all the time sitting on a batch of beats from Al.” Their near-constant workflow makes The Skeleton Key the product of a shared musical syntax that solely comes from a deep and fixed artistic observe. On this leaner, meaner second file, Al’s beats are spacious but brittle, peeling the layers from samples till solely a groove stays. Marci writes with laser-cut precision, his exploded-view rhyme schemes locking collectively just like the gears of an costly wristwatch. When a track has a refrain, it normally bookends one lengthy, sinister soliloquy. All the things provides as much as a virtually unbreakable pressure.
If The Elephant Man’s Bones was the soundtrack to a one-last-job jewellery heist, The Skeleton Key is the white-knuckle, bullet-sweating aftermath. Alchemist excels at pinpointing essentially the most unnerving components of a track—a minor-key piano modulation right here, a stressed drum fill there—and looping them to accentuate their unease: Contemplate the chilling, dissonant, four-chord vamp that carries “Chopstick” or the blaring horn that slices via light Rhodes noodling on “Road Magic.” “Chateau Josué” has an anagogic high quality, as if its greasy synth line and protracted kick had been a part of a ritual to wake the useless. Most placing is “Cryotherapy,” a wind tunnel of moaning vocals and what feels like a harp glissando compressed right into a ghostly shriek. Drums, if current in any respect, usually really feel a number of rooms away. Voices are recognizably human however bent into uncanny shapes. It’s a few of Al’s most spartan work, however nonetheless as colourful, psychedelic, and hair-raising as a giallo demise scene.
