Fat Boys — Crushin'

With studio album number four in as many years, Brooklyn hip-hop trio Fat Boys manage to get back on their feet and return to the top of the rap game after the flop of their previous album. That was also their last effort with Sutra Records, the boys in fact signed with Tin Pan Apple owned by their manager Charles Stettler. The production of the new album is handled by the Fat Boys themselves, Latin Rascals, Gary Rottger, Eddison Electrik and Van Gibbs.

The trio looks up and always sees their North Star, Run-DMC, shining. If the Queens duo delivers one of the hits of the decade with the rap-rock crossover "Walk This Way" in collaboration with Aerosmith, the Fat Boys are no exception and perform together with the Beach Boys with "Wipeout", banger that brings the group back into vogue and ends up in the top ten of the rnb singles, and in the top three in Germany, UK (where it remained in the charts for three months) and New Zealand.

The song, a cover of a famous sixties song by Surfaris, it's the last one recorded for this LP and is a crossover between rap and pop, a ballad over a disco-funky party beat that combines Fat Boys rapping and Beach Boys singing, where the hip-hop trio is blatantly imitating Run-DMC's cadence in the opening moments of their classic "It's Tricky", released as a single in 1987, a few months before the release of this piece.

The project features ten songs and about three quarters of an hour of material. The boys still try to imitate Run-DMC, in vain, delivering tight hardcore on simple, skeletal and rock rhythms, always unfit on these pseudo-rap rock tunes, ending up being tasteless ("Rock Ruling") and a trivial copy of the duo (title track, "Making Noise"), despite the decent work of the R&B singers in the background and / or on the functional hooks.

Towards the middle of the record there are variations, explicit in the playful and jazzy vibes of "Boys Will Be Boys" and in the ballad "Falling In Love", but they're tracks just went close to touch the listener's attention, without being able to hit the target. "Fat Boys Dance" returns to badly copy Run-DMC. After the collab with Beach Boys, the beatbox remains for a shake in another hardcore attempt ("Between the Sheets"), then "Hell, No", where the producers choose a skeletal hardcore rhythm close to industrial.

Published by Tin Pan Apple and Polydor, distributed by PolyGram, driven by the singles "Wipeout" and "Falling in Love" (#16 among rnb singles), the album flies up the charts and is the group's first to enter the top ten of the pop chart, stopping in eighth place, also climbing the rnb rankings to spot number four. It's one of the best-selling albums of the year and three months after its release the RIAA certified it platinum, the first (and only) in the history of the Brooklyn trio.

Rating: 4/10.