Griselda — WWCD

About five years after struggling into the underground every day spitting raw bars in everyone's face and bringing out a series of acts among the best of the period in hip-hop, especially in the East Coast gangsta/mafia and hardcore undergrowth, in 2017 the Griselda trio signs a contract with Eminem's Shady Records.

However, it takes over two years to unearth their debut album as a collective: they have arrived, and their thoughts go to the late-rapper Machine Gun Black, Benny's brother (you can appreciate his quality in the 2005 mixtape by Westside Gunn, "Flyest Nigga in Charge, Vol. 1"). On the eve of the release of the record, in late November 2019, the three rappers all have a classic album to their credit (actually, more than one): Conway the Machine entered the game strongly with one of the best hip-hop debuts of the last twenty five years ("Reject 2", 2015), Westside Gunn blessed everyone with an album that takes us sensationally back to the dusty and dark '95 ("FLYGOD", 2016), while Benny the Butcher, with a work not lower than the two already mentioned, he realizes one of the strongest drug rap record of the decade ("Tana Talk 3", 2018), then called a couple of legends and obscured them in one of the best EPs of the year, all-genres ("The Plugs I Met", 2019).

On their debut with a major label (Interscope), they don't have to prove anything and they choose not to prove anything: they play safely with fantastic boom bap rhythms, dark jazzy, skeletal and midtempo, made by Daringer and Beat Butcha, and they pull down gangsta-n-braggadocio bars, pretty good lines, but not too much (except Benny, who's goes always strong) and even abandon the references to wrestling, one of the things that allowed them to create a very solid core fan. They don't take too many risks, it's understandable, and they keep it straight Buffalo — the cover photographs a homeless from their city — but this effort doesn't feel up to the many excellent projects of the past: Raekwon's intro is acceptable, legitimate the name that the group has made over the course of these few years as worthy heirs of the Wu-Tang Clan — and this project is in fact designated as a sort of "36 Chambers" — before the trio is unleashed with quite solid, but never excellent cuts: Griselda pays homage to the Clan again by delivering back and forth, but none of the first five joints can be cataloged under the classical sphere. Yet they come close, "Che Dreds" is strong, so the single "Dr. Birds" and "Freddie HotSpot", but they aren't tracks that I return to listen to and find it hard to get into my daily airplay. Why? Because Daringer's production is all too crisp and clean and the trio bars are often not too memorable, they don't feel too dusty or dirty here. It's a clean, commercial record, it wants to be that clean-gangsta that you know right away that, precisely because its clean nature, will not be able to go strong in the charts: it's surprising that it has however reached the top ten of the Billboard hip hop albums.

Guests don't help. The record, in fact, loses polish in the second half due to some particularly bad appearances: Novel doesn't exalt "The Old Groove" as she should, 50 Cent simply copies the style of the trio in "City on the Map", which from the title track should being easily a classic, and Eminem is considered the worst guest of the whole project. One wonders why, but going to listen to what should have been a bonus, it's easy to understand it: without too many mince words, his verse proves useless here, he closes the album with a completely unfit performance with the rhythm and a mediocre delivery that sounds bad, while the other three go pretty well, thanks also to their excellent chemistry that's one of the many reasons for discover this project. It saves the outro of AA Rashid, the interlude with Tiona Deniece, and the verse of Keisha Plum, who places a veil of poethug on the album.

Rating: 7/10.