Atmosphere

Minneapolis's Atmosphere, fronted by Slug (a.k.a. Sean Daley) and producer Ant, aren't afraid of a little live instrumentation on the group's follow-up release to 2007's party album Strictly Leakage (which was offered online, quasi-In Rainbows-style, at no cost to you). In fact, album opener "Like the Rest of Us" initially feels more late-night piano-lounge confessional than beats-and-rhyme indie hip-hop, as if Slug drunkenly made his way up front of the dusty lodge, took to the stage, and started dumping his psyche into the mic, nodding as the piano-man recycled the same dusty loop beneath his contented but quietly deliberate flow. But, by the second track he has the crowd clapping along, and by the time "The Dreamer" takes hold, there is some veritable Roots-esque jamming and big, hooky chorus-mongering goin' on. Plus, the fun piano line and vocal rhythms on "Yesterday" so resemble Jurassic 5's classic "Concrete Schoolyard" that the earliest downbeat moments feel like a dream misremembered; never mind the club-ready "Humpty Dance" staccato bounce of lead single "Shoulda Known."

TV on The Radio's Tunde Adebimpe helps make "Your Glasshouse" an album highlight, lining the song's narrative and warbled electric swooshes with supplementary background vocals, while Tom Waits guests on penultimate "The Waitress," beatboxing over (below?) a storyline even he could admire. His wry dispensation of raw narratives is Slug's genius, and he offers plenty over the course of the album's fifteen tracks. Paint That Shit Gold serves as a perfect reminder that Atmosphere once nearly jumped to major label status, but that Slug and co. are much better off where they are, exploring their range, yet staying true to the independent spirit that has garnered them such a considerable and loyal underground following.

—William Morris
05/05/08

As the group that helped create the term "emo rap" and give Minnesota and Midwestern rap a place on the map, Atmosphere clearly feel a relative amount of freedom to express themselves however necessary on When Life Gives You Lemons, You Paint That Shit Gold, their fifth studio full-length. As he has on the duo's past albums, MC Slug plays the role of the storyteller, describing the lives of his various characters, all down on their luck (drug addicts, single mothers, homeless men) and struggling to just make it from day to day. The vitriol and anger that were found in Slug's earlier rhymes, however, has left -- along with much of Ant's heavier production -- and are replaced by lyrics that, though equally reflective, take a more resigned view of the world. These are people trying to cope with what they have and who they are, people who have accepted the facts that make their lives reality, who are no longer demanding something different. "They fight about money, they fight about life/So she concentrates so so hard on the music/And loses herself inside the bass and the movement" he rhymes in "In Her Music Box," describing a little girl, and in "Yesterday" he admits that "Leavin' me was probably the best thing you ever taught me." Slug has never been one to gloss over the ugly details, and when his characters are broken (and they all are, to varying degrees), he makes sure to let everyone know. "Your Glasshouse," which features TV on the Radio's Tunde Adebimpe on background vocals, tells of a woman for whom it "ain't the first time throwin' up in a strange toilet," and who then returned to the unknown bed "and fell back asleep," while "The Skinny" has the lines "Your lips taste like his dick/I can always tell when he's been in your whip," his pronunciation of that final syllable particularly exaggerated. The self-loathing and depression from Atmosphere's other albums are both still here, but they're less intense and immediate, reflected in Ant's concentration on live guitars and keyboards, a wholly more organic presentation. This is an understandably more mature group, but fans who've connected to the palpable anger found in the duo's music, if they haven't matured at the same rate or in the same way, may find Lemons to be lacking in the very thing that drew them to Atmosphere in the first place. ~ Marisa Brown, All Music Guide