Wu Tang's heir apparent Ghostface is back with the follow-up to 2004's masterpiece The Pretty Tony Album. Tony was a complex and slang-heavy album with thick soul textures and Ghost's trademark word volleys. The verses played like pages from a movie script -- each scene had something different. With Fishscale, Ghostface takes this formula and blows it wide open with topics that would have the average crack-rap superstar flinching in his new Nikes.
The album starts off with crack-centric tracks "Shaky Dog" and "Kilo," the first acting as a (re)-introduction to Tony Starks (Ghost's alias de jour) and the latter written as an ultra-realistic homage to the tedium of the number one gangsta-dealer pastime. What happens next is the first major movement of the album as Ghost reminisces on the beatings of his youth in "Whip You with a Strap." The way-back feel and whimpering style he picks up give the track a sincere flavor while the stutter-stop beat gives the joint a groove like a proper soul song.
The two singles "Be Easy" and "Back Like That" come next, but it's "Clipse of Doom" featuring MF Doom on production that is the next track that really grabs attention. With the proliferation of "crack-rap" has come the ever-increasing effort to front hardness and pose as "more ghetto-than-thou." This comes complete with vicious raps filling up the charts by sterile and generic "gangsta" rappers. On "Clipse," however, we get a rare track where the intensity of both the production and the emcee match the ugliness and violence of the lyrics. Here the album begins to cool down with the fantastic dream-scene "Underwater," where Starks takes a dip with mermaids and sees Spongebob in a Bentley coupe. It sounds crass, but the production and the delivery of the lyrics make it beautiful.
Fishscale is a solid album throughout, despite a few missteps in track placement and the occasional recycled MF Doom beat. Released as an A-side/B-side single the tracks would hold up nicely, but their placement here is a mystery to me. Overall this is a well-done hip-hop record and should be seen as the blueprint for a quality crossover album.
