AMS Album of the Week 8

Big Boi, or the other guy in OutKast, has always been a bit lost in the shadow of Andre 3000. Andre was the crazy experimentalist and Big Boi was just a really good rapper. Big Boi’s excellent debut solo album, Sir Lucious Left Foot, blurred that idea a little. There were big pop hits as well as great hip hop tracks. His second album sees him taking the experimental crown and just running with it. Vicious Lies and Dangerous Rumours is an incredibly diverse and ultimately very difficult record.

The main strength of this album lies in the unusual choice of collaborators. As well as some more obvious guests (Ludacris, Killer Mike, KiD CuDi) we are treated to Phantogram, Little Dragon and even Nathan Williams of Wavves fame. All the collaborators have a real influence on the tracks they feature on and as such, the album has an incredibly diverse range of sounds. We get Big Boi’s standard variety of Southern hip-hop filtered through trip-hop, pop rap and indie rock. It leads to a very interesting listen if not a particularly coherent one.

The problem with this is that a lot of the tracks just aren’t good enough. The more standard rap tracks are generally of a much lower standard than you’d expect from a Big Boi album. ‘She Hates Me’ and ‘Mama Told Me’ are both fantastic but the rest don’t really match expectations. For example, ‘Thom Pettie’ sounds great on paper. Little Dragon, Killer Mike and Big Boi on the same track sounds genius, but in reality it’s just a mess. The more unusual tracks are just as hit and miss. The Phantogram tracks are all pretty good, especially ‘CPU’, but the Little Dragon tracks aren’t very engaging. The highlight of the album is definitely the Wavves collaboration. Rap verses over indie rock riffs may not have been top of most people’s Christmas lists but it really works.

The biggest issue of all is that this doesn’t sound like a Big Boi album. It sounds like a collection of him featuring on other people’s tracks. It’s a real shame, because Sir Lucious Left Foot proved he can do it on his own and I was really excited to see him develop. Instead, we got the quite bizarre idea of him drowning in a sea of his own collaborators.