Artist:Gangrene
Album:Vodka & Ayahuasca
Release Date: Jan. 24
Label:Decon Inc.
Grade: B+
If you think vodka goes well with juice, wait until you try it with ayahuasca – one of the strongest psychedelic drugs on the planet. An album so deeply enclosed in hardcore drug culture, Vodka & Ayahuasca would only drop off the sinister producer/rapper duo known as Gangrene.
The Alchemist, one half of Gangrene, is a California-based producer and rapper who has worked with the likes of Dilated Peoples and Mobb Deep as well as legendary rappers such as Fat Joe, Jadakiss, Nas, and Eminem.
Oh No is the brother of hip hop artist Madlib, son of session musician and singer Otis Jackson, and nephew of Carnegie Hall jazz trumpeter Jon Faddis. Continuing the family lineage of music, Oh No has produced under hip-hop icons De La Soul, Mos Def, and his brother Madlib.
Together the two hip-hop veterans become Gangrene: a group identified by gritty, gory, and psychosomatic flow, these masterminds co-produce and rap over each other's work creating an integrated mix of their varying styles. However, there is one uniting characteristic: this is not club music, this is drug music.
Vodka & Ayahuasca, the second LP release from this super-group,swells with cruel, hard-hitting, and despotic lyrics. Tracks like "Flame Throwers" and "Livers for Sale" reek of malevolent references such as arson, selling body parts, drug production, and death by helicopter blades. They are the kind of lines you would expect to come from a metal band, but tucked into the threatening persona of this pseudo death rap group are some surprisingly clever uses of phrases.
"Dump Truck" exemplifies this with the lines, "Don't let the humble attitude fool you/ crack open your fruit, spill out the prune juice."
The most enjoyable features about the album include the emphasis of organic instruments – guitar, piano, and bass – that twist-in with synthesized accompaniment and vocal samples. Styles like hard rock and jazz accent the classic thick-kick structure rather well.
While the album is entertaining, it lacks some of the trippiness expected from the title and joining cover art. Listeners anticipating trip-hop or Central American influence should be warned that Vodka & Ayahuasca has neither. The title is purely a symbol of the amalgam created by these two hip-hop heads, and with this in mind, it fits quite well.
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