Benny the Butcher — Tana Talk 3

Debut studio album by Jeremie "Benny the Butcher" Pennick, rapper from Buffalo, New York. He's the second Griselda MC to make his debut after Westside Gunn, with "Flygod" (2016). The production is entirely performed by Daringer, three rhythms are reserved for The Alchemist. The guests are Keisha Plum, Westside Gunn, Meyhem Lauren, Royce da 5'9", Melanie Rutherford and Conway the Machine. The title refers to Montana Avenue, the street in Buffalo where Benny grew up, the third chapter of his series. The cover is a painting that portrays Machine Gun Black as a child, brother of the rapper who died in 2006.

Daringer and Alchemist create a dark and gloomy, dirty and dusty soundscape, made of hard midtempo drums and bewitching jazz and soul loops. The boom bap production is one of the best of the year in hip-hop, beautiful. The topics that Benny the Butcher slices on the meat counter are limited, mainly violent and mafioso, around drugs, guns, streets, crimes, braggadocio, including personal, socio-conscious and political extracts: the author makes the small amount of themes one of the many virtues of the project, always giving a different tone to his songs, thanks to a fantastic storytelling and some great metric schemes. The MC's rapping interpretation is flawless, excellent, always perfect, delivering with an incredibly smooth, dynamic, crisp, clean flow. The guests are a value, Westside Gunn and Conway the Machine get a verse each, Meyhem Lauren and Royce da 5'9" perform very well, Melanie Rutherford delivers a nice soul hook in "Who Are You?" and, in case you got lost wondering where you are, Keisha Plum is there to show you the way, poetically.

Usually, you understand from the first seconds that a music album is a classic. And this is the case. When the horn enters the intro accompanied by that midtempo drum heir to Havoc, you already know that the whole record will be a masterpiece. The rest is pure GxFR. Griselda. At its finest. Untouchable. Unreachable. The album conveys remarkable confidence, energy and power, it's purely mafia, street, gritty, rough and honest, Benny the Butcher is at his best.

As a huge fan of gangsta rap / mafioso rap, I've been looking for this album for a long time since 2014. I haven't found it. The era of that hip-hop subgenre was over for a decade now, it seemed destined to be gone forever and never to return. I was not aware of Roc Marciano. Griselda Records was in its infancy. Then, I would go back to listening to Big Pun, "Reasonable Doubt", Wu-Tang, "It Was Written", Big L, AZ, Biggie, Prodigy & Havoc. This album contains more or less all of them, in a unique, shiny, amazing artistic document.

Rating: 9/10.