About six years after the conclusion of the Luv NY project, a New York hip-hop super-group with some of the best MCs on the underground circuit, including Roc Marciano, Kurious, Lord Tariq, Kool Keith and DITC members AG & OC, Ray West, also a member of the group Luv NY, publishes another effort with AG.
It's their fourth official collaborative effort, on which the two decide to bring the project back to life by naming the album "NYLUV" and calling OC, El-Fudge, Sadat X (who worked with AG in the underground trio Trinity), Moonshine, Nelson Dialect and Dooley-O, and offering all to the guests a solo cut. Ray West tries to recreate that atmosphere with his jazzy production, while AG still struggles to spit lines in rapping.
The album opens with Omar Credle's solo "Won't Be There" on a light jazzy boom bap with great male soulful sample looped in the background and drum midtempo, soon after comes an extravagant performance of AG, and the third track is barely decent. Sadat X runs energetically in his short solo cut "Love is an Empire", on jazzy rhythm with good samples, then Moonshine offers bars with a regular style in the fifth choice, "Shopping at the Mall".
For the rest of these 28 minutes, the tape is weak and mediocre. Ray West brings out many bland and generic rhythms, while the bars of these almost amateur spitters fall flat on the midtempo drums chosen by the beatmaker, here less inspired than usual. In the midst of these desolate, desert soundscapes, I don't expect El-Fudge or Nelson Dialect to add anything, and, in fact, they don't.
Being an AG signed album, we need to go back to the Diggin' in the Crates Crew veteran: his friend Ray West gives him light midtempo and rhythms, the sample noir-sax in "She's Special" is one of the best of the edition, the rapper instead wastes every beat, his delivery is spoken, whispered, imperceptible, cumbersome, improbably slow, too lazy. With his 2018 LP "The Taste of AMBrosia", Andre "The Giant" Barnes seemed to have recovered the past shape and had confirmed good feelings in the following year's EP with Cuns, however, in 2020 he doesn't reconfirm those sensations, releasing two disappointing tapes in a semester.
Rating: 5/10.
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