Flatbush, Brooklyn hip-hop duo the Underachievers met and became friends over a shared love of mind-expanding drugs. MCs AK and Issa Gold got into a conversation about psychedelics while smoking pot at a mutual friend's house and were hanging out, making tracks and tripping together almost immediately thereafter, choosing the name Underachievers due to their fondness for activities that might come off as less than motivated to mainstream society. The irony is that Underachievers create anything but the type of mindless stoner pop-rap blather that Wiz Kalifah peddles or the one-dimensional weed-obsessed routines that afforded Cypress Hill their entire career. Early mixtapes sported not just inventive production but lyrical nods to third-eye spirituality and unconventional perspectives on social and religious issues. Proper debut full-length Cellar Door: Terminus Ut Exordium finds the Underachievers continuing on the strengths of their mixtape material, with their psychedelic tendencies coming through more in the album's somewhat ethereal production than anywhere else. The haunted string samples and syrupy drums of standout track "Chrysalis" back up the duo's nonstop flow, fluid and ceaseless lyrics feeling more dreamlike when meeting up with the almost celestial vibe of the beat. Trippy bangers like "Quiescent" and lurching, submerged beats like "Metropolis" show a little of what made the Underachievers appealing enough to producer Flying Lotus to sign them to his Brainfeeder label immediately. There's a kinship between Flying Lotus' experimental production daring and the Underachievers' wavy, paranoid, and still unfailingly intelligent rhyme styles. Cellar Door is a dense, sometimes relentless affair, and it takes several passes to latch on to the plethora of lyrical and production ideas that seem to flow by in a blur, but the Underachievers don't seem highly concerned with getting any overt points across. Instead, they've constructed a vivid and often mysterious beast of an album with snippets of commentary and perspective hidden within, highly enjoyable either taken at face value or dug into deeper.
© Fred Thomas /TiVo
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