Let’s get this straight: we don’t deserve another Ghostface album. It’s wrong, audacious, silly, and just greedy to ask Ghostface to record another masterpiece, when he only concocted the brilliant experiment that is Fishscale about 9 months ago. Two chances to do the same thing? Not quite summer school, but an examination of lyrical stamina, creativity, and will, Ghost ignores just about everything (the feasibility, quality, and productivity of such a task) and gives more cringe-worthy crack tales. The scene is different with Ghost giving his group an opportunity (and a piggyback ride) to rhyme along their captain and mentor. The results are certainly interesting and occasionally wonderful.
Like Father, Like Son
Ghost uses his opera voice as a staircase to corral listeners and lead them up and down the gradations of melo-drama (“Alex”), vengeance (“Greedy B****es”), and secular missionaries (“Miguel Sanchez” and “Outta Town Sh*t”).
It’s not nepotism when Sun God appears alongside Daddy Starks, but a neurotic pleasure, “her hands hurt like a b**ch when she braidin’, it’s so amazing”. The 17 year-old upshot shows flashes of embryonic brilliance, learning a bit from his father. This is the real and only father-son tandem in hip-hop (sorry Lil’ Wayne and Baby).
Ghost is pleasantly ravishing and ravaging, rapping with no limits, no patience, and seldom any choruses, but this comes packaged as motivation, how else to set the example for fellow group members? You forget that this album, in essence, is a rebuttal to fans’ lethargic march to the record stores and more so a fine cushion pad for Fishscale; Ghost shows no sense of privilege or contentment, swatting rhymes left and right maybe torturing someone on “Street Opera” or ordering murder of an enemy on “Blue Armor”.
Ghost Unit
The guests are fearsome and familial, literally speaking. Long time affiliates Trife Da God and Sean Wigs (and the aforementioned Sun God) bring a degree of tight-knit kinship that forms a nucleus enough for Ghost to give “strict spankings”. The rest of the rapping crew is fierce and even fecund, always having a falcon’s view of Ghost’s raps; it’s a learning experience that could not precede their performance any better. The beats are dull but still muffled mechanical minimalism at its most grating. On “Block Rock”, barely existent, light-hitting bumbling drums can be heard without much regard or reason, but it’s where Ghost excels and provides the nomenclature for his son, “at 3 AM, y’all like damn you put your son on the block// is it crazy?// to illuminate like the sun of god…"
The Bottom Line on More Fish
More praise is in need for More Fish, simply for the fact that an album like Fishscale preceded it, and not the other way around. And, listen, support Wallaby Champ, or else, well, let me say like this, or else Not Enough Fish might come out next week.
