Lester "Psycho Les" Fernandez, Jerry "Juju" Tineo and Bertony "Kool Fashion" Smalls make up The Beatnuts. Like most producers and DJs today, they too started a career in the music industry by remixing the works of other artists, before moving on to the production of original material.
After collaborating with several high-profile hip-hop artists, in 1993 they debuted with an EP of twenty-five minutes, eleven tunes, five skits: putting so many skits in an EP is sick, the Beatnuts prove to live up to this reputation with a positive lyricism focused on parties, girls and braggadocio. To this fun effortless lyricism, the group combines an excellent production: the rhythms are often composed of a jazzy boom bap, a slow syncopated lean drum machine and samples diversified from jazz, funk and soul albums, returning a festive and cheerful mood, and providing a competent soundscape to the group's slow and smooth syncopated delivery style. This trio balances themselves worthily over the course of the tracks, although Fashion (who will be Al Tariq) also does quite well on its own in "Third of the Trio". This record, published by Relativity and Violator, also achieved good commercial success, however the excessive number of useless skits made it lose a few steps among the best hip-hop EPs of its period. 7/10.
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