3rd Bass — The Cactus Album

When the Beastie Boys leave Def Jam to sign with Capitol, the Simmons label executives are forced to looking for a replacement: a trio of improvised Jewish white rappers are replaced by a duo of improvised white rappers (only MC Serch is Jewish). Plus DJ Richie Rich. The record has a good jazzy production with peaks of excellence, also thanks to extrovert and florid samples that absorb vibes from many different genres of the seventies, however most of the tracks have a simple and minimal beat, with trivial variations towards more frenetic and urgent ("Soul in the Hole", "Triple Stage Darkness", "Brooklyn-Queens"), with merely functional scratched hooks and excellent jazzy bridges on the hooks (dope smooth jazz in "Monte Hall", sensational that of "Steppin' to the AM").

The rapping is elementary, functional to the rhythms and decidedly mediocre: the two MCs deliver pretty fluently, technically clean, without ever impressing, they're decent, they've a quite light-hearted, simple and effective style, dropping bars focused mainly on braggadocio with a slow flow calm, relaxed, almost pleasant.

But this isn't the worst part, because the production is so strong as to hold up the stupid rhymes and generic farce of this duo: it's unforgivable the hilarious skit on Tom Waits' "Way Down in the Hole", which is a classic that you already heard: yes, because it's the awesome theme song of "The Wire", but above this beat, the 3rd Bass guys don't even spit a bar, they don't even try, the childish joke of MC Serch is painful to me. In retrospect, he and his friend Pete Nice couldn't know that this song would then be used in one of the most popular TV series ever, so whatever.

The album is actually killed by an infinity of skits all really put bad, two at the beginning, two at the end, half of the whole record are skits and there are no more than three tracks in a row and this thing hurts the smoothness of the album. Among the good things, there's the first appearance of MF DOOM under the name of Zev Love X in the song "The Gas Face" and he kills the cut (one of the rare highs of this album) and it must be said that the songs don't suck at all, they're all quite solid without excessive drops in the general quality. But don't be fooled: "The Cactus Album" is a good album, a good debut, honest, but it's not one of the greatest of its time. MC Serch later goes down in history for having discovered Nas.

Highlights: "Sons of 3rd Bass", "The Gas Face", "Steppin' to the A.M."

Rating: 7.4/10.