In the spring of 1994, Fredro Starr is at the beginning of his acting career when Lyor Cohen offers him to record a new album. Big DS leaves the group, Fredro Starr aka Never, Suave aka Sonee Seeza aka Sonsee, and Sticky Fingaz remain. Production is handled entirely by the Onyx and co-producer 8-Off Assassin aka Agallah, whom Jam Master Jay decides to credit only three times. Guests are Panama P.I. and All City (Greg Valentine & J Mega), artists who have signed with the Onyx label. The album consists of ten tracks and five additional skits, for a total of three quarters of an hour of listening.
It's a different album from the debut two years earlier. The group's lyrics are more socio-conscious, nihilistic and angry, with violent, criminal, horrorcore and drug themes, and less brag than usual. The music made by the three is dark and dirty, heavily claustrophobic, excellent. The drums hit wildly midtempo and downtempo and are lethal, the bass pulls up the rhythms from the depths of the manholes, and the samples are inserted more to give a kind of humanity to the songs than to make them accessible to the listener. The execution of the Onyx is the main protagonist of the project, the boys scream and shout obsessively for three quarters of an hour with a robust style, cold and dirty, aggressive and gritty, bloody heavy.
Released by JMJ and Rush Associated Labels, distributed by PolyGram, the album is lukewarmly received by contemporaries and elevated to rough diamond in retrospect. It's their best album, it doesn't aim to grind numbers, doesn't watch the radio, has minimal promotion and remains deeply underground, hitting box #2 on the rap chart, without equaling the sales of the debut. It's born and thrives underground, it's a street LP, made from the streets to the streets, whose distilled aggressiveness sternly looks at the humor in which the previous one was wet: very dark, mean, coherent and purely hardcore, forged from intense, hard and sensational boom bap production and menacing, raw and irresistible rap, it's one of the best hardcore hip-hop albums released in the nineties.
Rating: 9/10.
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