The Elephant Man’s Bones was a real occasion album—a long-rumored, extremely anticipated assembly of two hip-hop legends. It delivered on the hype in stunning style: a minimalist opus that shivered and smoldered greater than it slapped. Although it bore the stylistic markings of its creators, Roc Marciano and the Alchemist, the album felt distinct of their respective catalogs. As a substitute of mangled soul loops and hard-edged boom-bap, this was mafioso rap tuned by Tibetan singing bowls; Al supplied a pineal gland-stimulating airiness via which Marci floated just like the ghost of a kingpin. Two years later, after attending to their solo careers, Al and Marci return with The Skeleton Key, a weirder, bleaker, extra hermetically sealed tackle status road rap. There’s no bloat, no friends, and no superfluous sounds. Every of its 10 songs seems like peering round a darkish nook, an inescapable menace saturating each second.
After discovering a collective voice with The Elephant Man’s Bones, the pair settled into a snug rhythm, capitalizing on a long-simmering inventive connection. “We at all times making music,” Marci defined to Rolling Stone. “I’m at all times sitting on a batch of beats from Al.” Their near-constant workflow makes The Skeleton Key the product of a shared musical syntax that solely comes from a deep and fixed inventive apply. On this leaner, meaner second file, Al’s beats are spacious but brittle, peeling the layers from samples till solely a groove stays. Marci writes with laser-cut precision, his exploded-view rhyme schemes locking collectively just like the gears of an costly wristwatch. When a track has a refrain, it often bookends one lengthy, sinister soliloquy. All the things provides as much as a virtually unbreakable stress.
If The Elephant Man’s Bones was the soundtrack to a one-last-job jewellery heist, The Skeleton Key is the white-knuckle, bullet-sweating aftermath. Alchemist excels at pinpointing probably the most unnerving components of a track—a minor-key piano modulation right here, a stressed drum fill there—and looping them to accentuate their unease: Think about the chilling, dissonant, four-chord vamp that carries “Chopstick” or the blaring horn that slices via mild Rhodes noodling on “Road Magic.” “Chateau Josué” has an anagogic high quality, as if its greasy synth line and chronic kick have been a part of a ritual to wake the useless. Most hanging is “Cryotherapy,” a wind tunnel of moaning vocals and what feels like a harp glissando compressed right into a ghostly shriek. Drums, if current in any respect, usually really feel a number of rooms away. Voices are recognizably human however bent into uncanny shapes. It’s a few of Al’s most spartan work, however nonetheless as colourful, psychedelic, and hair-raising as a giallo loss of life scene.