2 out of 5

Label: Fill in the Blanks

Produced by: Various

Every hip-hop album has a few battle tracks.  Y’know, name-calling, ‘I’m the best’ repping, listen-to-me-rhyme-words-about-how-good-I-am-to-prove-how-good-I-am.  It’s part of the genre.  It’s how a lot of these guys and gals make their names before making their names.  At best, these tracks can liberate an artist from a more structured narrative (even if that narrative is about fucking hos with their big cocks, bitch), allowing for some truly creative or humorous wordplay.  And if you’re familiar with that artist’s scene – friends, enemies – these tracks can serve as something of a fan-appreciation track as well, with winks to names and themes known to those more dedicated fans.  At best.  Usually, you get a good beat and some rhymes, and that can be good enough.  At worst – which is more often than not, actually – you just want them to get back to the fucking show.  Battle rhymes work on stage because it’s a vibe spurned on by competition.  To take the time to record the track, to produce it… often comes across as way too self-congratulatory.  Which there’s probably already plenty of on the disc, so to strip away any sliver of pretense and to just full-on dedicate a track or two to it can be a little grating.  But, as I said, it’s part of the genre.  So you get used to it, and hopefully your favorite artist gets that stuff out of his or her system earlier on in their career when there’s still something to prove.

Now how about a whole album’s worth of battle tracks?  Sounds… sounds…  Yeah, it’s pretty annoying.  So Carnage the Executioner apparently made his name known through beat-boxing, live acts, guesting on other’s work.  And a promised album which never seemed to materialize.  I learned of him through a spot on Eyedea and Abilities ‘E&A’ album, something which apparently frustrates Carnage, as, during one his many ‘I’m the best’ rants, reminds us that he was around before Eyedea, and is not his ‘protege.’  (Yes, he tells Mr. Larsen to rest in piece in the album closing thank-yous.)  So eventually Fill in the Blanks I guess got an album together, and we have 12 tracks of Carnage spittin’ over various producers’ beats.  Carnage’s flow and lyrical dexterity are all clear: even though the songs may mostly be without much soul, you rarely hear lines repeated.  And the production is also pretty sweet – from the metal rock backing of Concentrate’s ‘Black Steal’ to the hard funk of the best track on ‘Worth the Wait,’ 8 Bza’s ‘I Want It All!’, the music holds up to repeat listens.  It’s just Carnage’s words that start to tire.  He spits at a rather consistent intensity, which in turn forces his producers to match the noise with his style, making the mix, on the whole, pretty noisy.  When he is focusing on trying to tell a story or making a point, such as the autobiographical ‘I Want It All!’ or the maybe political ‘Prepare for the Worst,’ or even when he’s equating the power of his rhymes to, like, murder (‘Comin’ Thru Ya Speaker’), the lines tend to stick out a bit and the choruses hit.  But everything else is just me-me-me with a lot of swearing and dirty metaphors for emphasis, and it just wears thin.  And because the focus on these tracks is to be impressive with his rhymes, when you sift through the bluster to tune in to what’s being said, you’ll hear some cheating – by which I mean rhymes that don’t have much context in the song.  The roundtable ‘The Class-Sicks,’ featuring 12 guest rappers, covers all of this material, and covers it in a more varied and entertaining way than the solo tracks.  That was enough.  Carnage obviously has the ear for beats and the talent for rhymes; applying it to something that’s at least a step beyond battling could make for a pretty great album.  Opening things up a bit further for some tone and pacing variations could make it a classic.