Album Review: Badbadnotgood & Ghostface Killah - Sour Soul

With BADBADNOTGOOD providing an ice-cold-soul backdrop, Ghostface gets mean, really mean, with all the measure, confidence and menace you would expect from a jaded veteran of his ilk. The up-tempo live breaks of Ray Gun provide space for the one and only MF Doom to strike up yet another collaboration (we wait impatiently for the full-length album) while the creeping Oriental motifs of Six Degrees suit Danny Brown’s whiney weirdo-speak to a tee. Elsewhere, Tone’s Rap slows things down to an absolute crawl and allows Ghostface to drop some of the most brutal, pimped-out, ho-slapping lines of his career. It’s dark, heartless stuff and all the better for it. Creating undeniable tension, BADBADNOTGOOD’s backdrops move from Pulp Fiction surf-blues to up-tempo blaxploitation funk-soul as equally devoid of warmth as they are full of cinematic atmosphere. The ugly bastard child of a fleeting tryst, Sour Soul is a hip hop one of a kind.