For nearly 20 years, the Minneapolis rapper-producer duo Atmosphere—Slug (Sean Daley) and Ant (Anthony Davis), respectively—have been trying to find a balance. The alt-sloping founders of the indie rap stable Rhymesayers have been teetering between identities as idols (to a cult-like following of passionate fans) and beleaguered hand-wringers (to everyone else). They’ve earned an “emo rap” tag by delivering plainspoken pleas in spoken-word cadences that saunter through dusty MPC loops, and they cornered the market on a specific subset of pre-internet rap by fearlessly divulging to anyone who’d listen.
Slug and Ant have always functioned well as a duo because they’re in search of the same thing: shared feelings. Ant once said he’s a “sensitive fucking person” who’s “totally just about truth,” peddling his emotions through a blues-tinged soundboard, and Slug is a working class MC who shares every painstaking thought from deep in his tortured soul. But we’re now reaching the point (or maybe we’re past the point) where thinking out loud has turned the corner into over-sharing. On their latest album, Fishing Blues, Atmosphere make rap just for the sake of making it. This thing has no function or utility.
Atmosphere albums haven’t been interesting (or necessary) for a few years. The two partners worked at a distance for the first time on their last one, 2014’s Southsiders, which was their second dad-rap record (following The Family Sign). Southsiders tried to sort out exactly what Atmosphere songs inspired by fatherhood and domesticity might sound like. The results were predictably lame. The ideas were overwrought, gracelessly executed, and sometimes just straight-up boring. Fishing Blues makes a lot of the same mistakes, only it’s way longer and even more uneven. This is the Atmosphere take on the vanity project where even the self-deprecation is half-assed: On “No Biggie,” Slug raps, “Take a photo with the number one loser/Trying to get used to living in the future.” Take that lyric at face value and it says Slug is having trouble adjusting to what’s current, which would explain some of this album’s dated choices—e.g. its lead single is called “Ringo.”
But as proof this isn’t just an age or longevity problem, there’s “When the Lights Go Out,” a song that features rap veterans Kool Keith and DOOM in different roles. Both deliver admirably. DOOM gets a verse, and though it’s far from his best, it’s more than enough to stand out here. Aesop Rock, who just this year proved the adventurous Year 20 indie rap album was possible, pops up. pops up for a chanting outro, but he doesn’t get to do any serious rapping on “Chasing New York,” which he could’ve salvaged.
Fishing Blues has no stakes—with or without this record, the Atmosphere legacy is cemented—and the sloppy writing, disinterested rapping, and overall conservative artistic decisions seem to reflect that. Some of the lines are bad (“We on a spaceship, crash land from above/We on a lazy river, fly fishing for love” from “A Long Hello”) and a lot are lazy (“She was encyclopedia thick” and “attitude of a hot bowl of cat food” from “No Biggie”). This is a tedious listen with little replay value, where the only reprieve from the droning is a laugh from a clunker.
It should be noted that Slug is a very good rapper and Ant a skilled producer, so any Atmosphere record, even the most purposeless one, is bound to get it right at least some of the time, especially on a release with 18 tracks. The most gripping moments on Fishing Blues either step way outside the parameters of traditional Atmosphere, like the electro-fused “Seismic Waves,” or double down, like on “Besos,” which accents a boxy breakbeat with flutes. There are a handful of really intricate rhyme structures scattered throughout (On “Everything”: “I got the coldest shoulder in the solar system/I know because I drove around this whole existence”). The second verse of “Besos” is a technical marvel, an unconscious performance with tightly-written scheming. Slug does some of his best rapping about race and heritage on “Perfect,” with self-aware bars like “Some say that I pass, none say that I'm passive/White trash with a fraction of blackness” and “Irish name, Scandinavian frame/I'm a Rubik's cube, I'm the American dream.”
Politically-charged and socially conscious records might the next frontier for Atmosphere. In “Seismic Waves,” there’s a great lyric about Trayvon Martin and Ronald Reagan. And Fishing Blues’ saving grace, the only song with any real passion and continuity, is one about police brutality written from the perspective of the officer. In the hands of a less capable thinker and lyricist, this concept would be an epic fumble, but Slug pens an expert indictment of a militarized police force: “It all depends on how you fit into my spectrum/From lectures, to handcuffs, to beat downs, to death wish/I was told to tell a one-sided story, and that's why I had to eliminate your perspective.” It’s one of the few times you get the sense that he still has reason to rap, and it’s a reminder that Atmosphere can still make great music, when given the proper motivation.
