by Justin Davis (@AnkhDeLillo)
For three decades after World War II, California writer Ross Macdonald became a titan of hard boiled crime fiction through his most well-known character: private detective Lew Archer. In novels like The Barbarous Coast and The Galton Case, Archer combs through the ruthless world of the West Coast’s rich and infamous while remaining an eternal outsider — wrestling with moral ambiguity and insomnia in cheap motels and rundown apartments. “I felt like a lonely cat, an aging tom ridden by obscure rage, looking for torn-ear trouble,” he recounts in 1949’s The Drowning Pool. “Night streets were my territory, and would be till I rolled in the last gutter.”
Like Macdonald, veteran rapper-producers (and Californians) Oh No and The Alchemist frequently use their work to peer at highbrow city life from its lowbrow, morally-gray margins — especially when they team up as Gangrene. From their 2010 debut Gutter Water to 2015’s You Disgust Me, the Gangrene project refracts their vaunted roles in rap’s underground through the underground as a place. Unlike Ross Macdonald’s famed detective, though, asceticism and ennui are out of the question: they’re eager to bask in the fruits of under-the-table payments and gory shootouts (there’s a reason why the duo were tapped to help curate the score and soundtrack of Grand Theft Auto V). Their newest album, Heads I Win, Tails You Lose, comfortably expands on their keen eye for world-building. It’s tailor-made for peering into a back alley, exploring the recesses of your mind on a potent hallucinogen, or lifting a manhole cover to climb into a dimly-lit sewer.
Like previous Gangrene projects, Heads I Win sees the two diving headfirst into dark, gritty psychedelia: smooth soundscapes of jazz bands, orchestras, and sparse funk get paired with distorted instruments, dissonant layers and abrupt vocal snippets. Take the lead single “Oxnard Water Torture” — where Oh No provides an eerie swing that sounds like it could back a horror movie’s chase scene — or the frantic, haunting organs that break up each verse on “Espionage.” While the split of their production duties varies from album to album, this one skews mainly toward The Alchemist, who’s behind the boards on eight of thirteen tracks. On “Cloud Surfing” (produced by Oh No), gentle flutes take up the foreground until scattered clips of piano and Jadakiss samples pierce the veil. The Alchemist-produced outro, “Muffler Lung,” skips back and forth between dry, wheezing horns and waterfalls of keys, overloading your senses with just a few moving parts.
The Alchemist’s rapping sits firmly in a school of underground lyricism that’s been pioneered by Raekwon and Roc Marciano: winding rhyme schemes that filter his inner world through the language of pimps and mob bosses. He likes taking offbeat paths to familiar flexes: for example, there’s a quirky charm when he says he’s “getting fat, need to add a notch on my Versace leather belt.” Like Marciano, you can often hear his cadence bump into the end of the bar like a three car pileup, but there are also some surprising moments here where he tries out new flows. On “Watch Out” — where Oh No prominently samples Doug E. Fresh and Slick Rick’s classic 1985 track “The Show” — he kicks off his verse in a singsongy, Rick-inspired drawl.
Oh No often relies on dense, multisyllabic flows and a rich tone that recall California veterans Planet Asia and M.E.D. Next to The Alchemist’s roundabout imagery, he’s a more plain-spoken, aggressive foil — like when he raps on “Oxnard Water Torture” that “this ain’t your Moët, this Olde English” — but he’s still intricate in his own way. “Dinosaur Jr.” shows him in rare form, bragging about an itchy trigger finger and surgical work ethic with a dizzying verse.
The guests are spare and well-selected: Evidence slips seamlessly into the moody, laidback aura of “Magic Dust” like a bathrobe, while prolific DC rapper BIG LORDY (aka ANKHLEJOHN) provides his sharp, rambling flow on “The Gates of Hell,” — sounding like the rent is due and he’s getting paid by the syllable. On “Modern Day Art,” a show stealer featuring Boldy James, everyone’s in their bag: gentle strings and thick bass drive the track forward, as Gangrene save some of their fiercest brags for an elegant backdrop. The Alchemist shows cold, mechanical violence filling his calendar, quipping that his pistol will “give you a beauty mark”; Oh No invokes architecture, spray paint and photoshop to describe picking apart his enemies. Amid comparisons to Basquiat and Bobby Blue Bland, James paints drug running and gang wars as an aesthetic endeavor: “when the color of blood contrasts with the street, what a masterpiece / I’m from where the D in Detroit stands for living dastardly.”
Oh No slyly raps on “Espionage” that “I don’t go to clubs, I leave that for the youngsters and the thugs,” and it instantly evokes the album cover: dive bars, trash-ridden curbs, and neon signs punching through the darkness. Next to his and The Alchemist’s more high-profile jobs of the 2020s, Gangrene is a seedy, comfortable detour — best kept tucked away in a cool, dark place.