Review Hip Hop

Atmosphere

Seven’s Travels

Rhymesayers Entertainment • 2013

»Seven’s Travels«, the fourth studio-album by the Minneapolis-based duo Atmosphere is celebrating its tenth anniversary. On this record, MC Slug and producer DJ Ant have presented themselves on the very peak of their shared musical creativity. Slug manages his pretty unagitated, yet emphatically performed, and often thoughtful rhymes in his usual manner of story-telling, while Ant’s productions, through pressing beats and fresh samples, provide a direction that one happily wants to follow for a whole album-length. Admittedly, the record might be a bit too long: Among 19 tracks (on vinyl, there are even 23!), you’ll find highlights like »Los Angeles«, »Lifter Puller« and »Always Coming Back Home To You«, but then there are also a few mediocre fillers that the record wouldn’t have needed. The album, originally created as a co-op between Rhymesayers Entertainment and the punk-label Epitaph is now being re-released as an anniversary-edition. The cover used is the one planned but not realized in 2003, showing a naked woman lying on a meadow. Back in 2003, two months before the album’s release, a sixteen-years-old girl was killed by a cleaning woman at an Atmosphere-gig in Albuquerque, which is why Slug and Ant decided to release the record with a plain white cover. What used to be the bonus-tracks for the vinyl version is now a regular part of the CD, additional to four more extra-tracks, trying to make the record even more palatable. And the concept works just fine: »My Songs« is one incredibly positive piece of Hip Hop, »A Song We Made With Sage« features Sage Francis who easily lifts his heavy verses and the cover of »Man Of War« is a rocker worthily wrapping up a great record.

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