Hearing Alchemist’s beat drop from the very beginning of Lord Steppington’s opening track, “More Wins,” is like opening a can of ginger ale, pulled right from a refrigerator—they are both incredibly refreshing.
In a hip-hop landscape that can be, at times, overrun with incredibly generic and flaccid trap-style beats, “cinematic” sounding MIDI strings, and “big” sounding synths, the legendary production of the Alchemist and his complex, thought provoking style is always welcomed to my ears.
Coming off of his work with Detroit rapper Boldy James, as well as his recent turn with Prodigy of Mobb Deep, Lord Steppington marks his long in the works debut paired with Evidence (of Dilated Peoples fame)—working under the moniker Step Brothers, and not to be confused with the OTHER Step Brothers of hip hop: Starlito and Don Trip.
Of the album’s fourteen tracks, musically speaking, much of it is incredibly solid. The beats can hit hard (“Step Masters”), skeletal and laid back (“Draw Something”), triumphant and soulful (“More Wins”) or even slightly claustrophobic and unsettling (“Byron G.”)
There are only a few occasions where things don’t exactly work out, and it always seems to be on a track where whatever song was originally sampled is allowed to stick around for much longer than it should—both “Buzzing Away,” and “Banging Sound” have this issue, and the sped up sample in “See the Rich Man Play” kind of teeters into this area as well.
While listening to Lord Steppington, I found that many of the beats have a familiar feeling to them—this was something I found when I heard the aforementioned Boldy James LP My First Chemistry Set, which was released in October. I suppose that kind of feeling could say a lot about the timelessness and ease that Alchemist’s and Evidence’s production work has.
Both Alchemist and Evidence pull double duty here as producers and rappers—and they both have an incredibly aggressive, serious delivery, giving nearly every track a very gritty atmosphere. And sure, there are bits of humor and witticisms interjected within the lyrics, but for the most part, Lord Steppington is pretty heavy duty. As a product of the 80s, growing up in a house where Brothers in Arms was readily to the turntable, I really enjoyed the clever usage of the refrain from Dire Straights “Money For Nothing” in the track “Dr. Kimble.”
There were a few “eh” moments, however—the in-between song skits (as expected) leave much to be desired, and the track “Mums in The Garage,” feels like a throwback to the Mafioso style of rap music that you would hear on golden age are Wu-Tang solo albums—not that it’s a bad thing, but it’s also not exactly a good thing either.
I feel like it’s worth noting that the songs that make up the album are all incredibly self-contained—many make reference to the name of the project. And seeing as how they were all written for this album, I suppose that’s fair. But it make it difficult to remove them from this setting—Lord Steppington may be the kind of album that needs to be taken as a whole, and is simply just not the kind of thing that can be broken up into specific pieces.
As much as I may claim to be an expert at rap and hip-hop, I’m really not, but I’m incredibly tough to please. Rarely are there new hip-hop albums that just completely blow me away—some of it is okay, much of it is unmemorable, and a bulk of it leaves me non-plussed and unmoved. Lord Steppington, for me, is neither underwhelming nor is it overwhelming—it simply just is. I don’t think it’s the kind of album that is out to change lives. It’s a solid hip-hop release from veterans of the industry, both continuing to show no signs of slowing down.
Rating: 3/5