Atmosphere new album.....

[Ali Tha Great]

can someone pm me this shit?

[NotoriousTDA]

yeah, im more excited about this than i am about my girl having a baby soon.

haha damn thats pretty harsh. How old are you yishay?

[Elano]

Underground hip-hop group Atmosphere recently earned the No. 5 spot on the Billboard 200 for their latest release, When Life Gives You Lemons, You Paint That sh*t Gold. This is the highest spot the duo has ever obtained in their decade-plus career. SOHH caught up with the Atmosphere front man, Slug, to talk about their newfound success.


After six albums, Atmosphere - the Minneapolis powerhouse consisting of Slug and DJ/ producer Ant - has finally earned its first top 10 record. But Slug is careful not to let their chart position weigh too heavily in their minds.

"It's a fresh thing but I'm not dumb enough to let it go to my head," Slug said. "I see behind the curtain and I know what all this sh*t really is. If there had been a couple of good rap releases to come out that same week, we wouldn't have been No. 5. Let's just be real. All those kinds of things are elusions to a certain extent. It's not like me and Mariah [Carey] are actually battling for fans."

As SOHH previously reported, the group's record label, Rhymesayers Entertainment, which Slug co-founded, and is home to such other underground favorites as MF Doom and Brother Ali, recently announced a partnership with Warner Music's Independent Label Group. Under the agreement, Atmosphere gleans major label marketing among other things.

"The people at the label, they're happy as f*ck," Slug said. "But me and Ant? We're like we got a show to do tomorrow, so let's look at that."

Atmospher fans appreciate their noes to the grind approach and according to Slug, they share in the crew's achievements.

"When you buy a record from the guy that sells 1.5 million records, it's hard to see yourself as a part of his success," he explained. "But when you buy a record from a guy that sells 20,000 records, you're a big part of that guy's rent."

Imprinting under Warner hasn't changed the group's mission or its definition of success. Atmosphere is still all about the fans and the duo doesn't plan on using the No. 5 spot to launch them into some sort of commercialized success.

"We stare at the kids in the crowd, that's where we gauge what our next moves are and I think Warner understands that about us," he clarified. "Wthout that 36,000 people that bought my record the first week, I'm nothing."

Breaking out in 1998, Atmosphere is one of the most long-lived independent hip-hop acts. Lemons, the group's fifth studio album is the follow up to '05's You Can't Imagine How Much Fun We're Having - which comparatively peaked at No. 66 on the charts.

[Lord Funk]

I like the fact that threads about this album keep popping up and getting bumped and falling and rising. Because that's the kind of reaction that a record like this should get - it's a grower. It's not immediate. I can imagine that a lot of real hip-hop purists would dislike it on first impressions. And it's not perfect. But it's packed with interesting, original ideas and song concepts that make you think, rewind and catch the idea again. And the more I listen to it, the more I hear, both in the music and lyrics. The description of a hangover from hell on 'Your Glass House' is so vivid it makes me feel sick hearing it, and that's partly Slug's rhymes but partly the churning, dark music. It's brilliant story-telling. 'In Her Music Box' is a song about father-daughter relationships that Eminem could never write. And the song about his dad - especially the line "I've been meaning to ask you if I;m doing alright?" - is fucking gut-wrenching. Really bitter-sweet and poignantly done.

This album isn't for everyone, but if you're a hip-hop head at least 'preview' it. You just might like it.

[Elano]

^^ 

[JAZ]

yeah, im more excited about this than i am about my girl having a baby soon.

haha damn thats pretty harsh. How old are you yishay?

20.

[smegma]

yeah, im more excited about this than i am about my girl having a baby soon.

hahahha

[Laconic]

I like the fact that threads about this album keep popping up and getting bumped and falling and rising. Because that's the kind of reaction that a record like this should get - it's a grower. It's not immediate. I can imagine that a lot of real hip-hop purists would dislike it on first impressions. And it's not perfect. But it's packed with interesting, original ideas and song concepts that make you think, rewind and catch the idea again. And the more I listen to it, the more I hear, both in the music and lyrics. The description of a hangover from hell on 'Your Glass House' is so vivid it makes me feel sick hearing it, and that's partly Slug's rhymes but partly the churning, dark music. It's brilliant story-telling. 'In Her Music Box' is a song about father-daughter relationships that Eminem could never write. And the song about his dad - especially the line "I've been meaning to ask you if I;m doing alright?" - is fucking gut-wrenching. Really bitter-sweet and poignantly done.

This album isn't for everyone, but if you're a hip-hop head at least 'preview' it. You just might like it.

I agree with just about everything you said except the part about Your Glasshouse.  And that's one of the reasons why I love Slug's writing.  This is what he had to say about the track:

8.) "Your Glasshouse"

Slug: "I don't want to say it's trendy, but it's contagious for everybody to take issue with what's going on in this presidential administration. It's become the new thing, when even losers like myself started to pay attention to politics. That was a sign to me. But every time I've tried to say something socially worthy, it always comes off preachy, and I don't like being that guy. I never really did a great job of alluding to what the song's really about. For the most part, I think people are going to think it's about a hangover. My friend Tunde (Adebimpe) of TV on the Radio sings backup vocals on it. It's real subtle. I thought he stole the show from me, which is the only reason I turned him way down."

How great is that? 

[Doggystylin]

what? my glasshouse is about the bush administration? how?

[Laconic]

^I don't think it's particularly about the Bush administration but people in those types of positions in general, including the Presidential candidates of '08.

glass·house n. A place, position, or situation involving intense public scrutiny.

[Lord Funk]

I like the fact that threads about this album keep popping up and getting bumped and falling and rising. Because that's the kind of reaction that a record like this should get - it's a grower. It's not immediate. I can imagine that a lot of real hip-hop purists would dislike it on first impressions. And it's not perfect. But it's packed with interesting, original ideas and song concepts that make you think, rewind and catch the idea again. And the more I listen to it, the more I hear, both in the music and lyrics. The description of a hangover from hell on 'Your Glass House' is so vivid it makes me feel sick hearing it, and that's partly Slug's rhymes but partly the churning, dark music. It's brilliant story-telling. 'In Her Music Box' is a song about father-daughter relationships that Eminem could never write. And the song about his dad - especially the line "I've been meaning to ask you if I;m doing alright?" - is fucking gut-wrenching. Really bitter-sweet and poignantly done.

This album isn't for everyone, but if you're a hip-hop head at least 'preview' it. You just might like it.

I agree with just about everything you said except the part about Your Glasshouse.  And that's one of the reasons why I love Slug's writing.  This is what he had to say about the track:

8.) "Your Glasshouse"

Slug: "I don't want to say it's trendy, but it's contagious for everybody to take issue with what's going on in this presidential administration. It's become the new thing, when even losers like myself started to pay attention to politics. That was a sign to me. But every time I've tried to say something socially worthy, it always comes off preachy, and I don't like being that guy. I never really did a great job of alluding to what the song's really about. For the most part, I think people are going to think it's about a hangover. My friend Tunde (Adebimpe) of TV on the Radio sings backup vocals on it. It's real subtle. I thought he stole the show from me, which is the only reason I turned him way down."

How great is that? 

Ha! That's awesome. Just proves my point about how great the song writing is here - even for people like me who just take the lyrics on face value, it still works brilliantly. Hey Laconic - can you point me to the interview where Slug breaks down the tracks like this? Thanks man.

[Elano]

Pitchfork Review
Rating: 7.0

Drug addiction is bad, but drama addiction might be worse. That is the lesson of "Shoulda Known", Atmosphere's salvo at that stock character, the enabler. Taken from Minneapolis duo's fifth studio album, When Life Gives You Lemons, You Paint That Shit Gold, the song is more dramatic monologue than soliloquy-- one of those rare moments when Slug isn't plumbing the depths of his favorite subject, Slug. (Watching the video for "Shoulda Known", you might gather that Slug's new subject is soon-to-be-rescued American Apparel models.) Even the album's title-- judged against their college-rap classics Overcast and Lucy Ford-- hints that this outing may be less, well, narcissistically emo. Could Atmosphere's sad-clown era really be over?

Slug's lyrics, it turns out, are refreshingly mundane. When Life Gives You Lemons comes off not so much as a memoir of a bohemian artist, but as an old liberal's debut short-story collection. It isn't as dull as it sounds. The enabler is one of many resolutely unglamorous figures here, joining a procession of rust-belt standbys-- late-shift waitress, warehouse worker, deadbeat dad, homeless man, Tom Waits-- straight out of Studs Terkel. It's a noble idea, but it doesn't quite suit Slug's talents, which can veer, in typical backpacker fashion, toward the didactic and sentimental. Even so, it is a welcome leap for the MC to step out of his turbulent inner life and into the shoes of unsung-- at least, unrapped-- working-class men and women.

Producer Ant isn't retracing old paths either-- though he finds more success than his partner. He sets "Shoulda Known", for instance, above synthetic handclaps and a glum, coldly fuzzed bass that, together, seem like the embryo of a Justin Timberlake track, before the star's producers add the de rigueur layers and velocity. It's a far cry from the humbly retro collage of samples that grounded Ant's signature sound in the past-- and it works. In a marriage of live instrumentation and vintage analog synths, Ant finds a new way to build set pieces for Slug's tortured narratives. Take the soulfully cheesy, ersatz-Gnarls Barkley "You", for instance. Sticking to the second-person perspective, and unburdened by the gnawed-to-oblivion themes of drug abuse, "You" could have been a strong lead single. Everyone knows about the needle and the damage done; the question forgotten by too many songwriters, faithfully remembered here, is how ordinary folks make it through the day and make ends meet. Along the same lines, at the heart of "Dreamer" and "Guarantees" are families trying to get by in a broken, dead-end economy.

Obviously the trials of parenthood, not exactly a staple on DJ playlists, loom large in Slug's visions of 9-to-5 life. Lyrically, like the songs in between, those that bookend When Life Gives You Lemons are adventurous precisely because they're not adventurous, not spectacular, not sensational. "Like the Rest of Us" introduces the album with a sleepy melody from a child's music box. The song proceeds with a loop of smoky-nightclub pianos, a plaintive backdrop for Slug's smooth whispers about mothers-to-be and casual cocaine users. But a brighter, faster music box gives the album's closer, "In Her Music Box", a vibe that is wrier and angrier, perfect for a song about the R-rated nihilism streaming out of parents' car radios. The thread that runs from the first song to the last is a warm sympathy for working-class heroes and antiheroes-- especially the ones trying raise kids.

More energy and less uniformly drab scenery might have kept these well-intentioned stories from blurring into each other. One that stands apart is the mainstream-aimed "Guarantees", which treads dangerously close to mall-core. Too often the duo's slow, spartan approach just assures that songs like "Your Glasshouse" and "The Skinny" never leave the ground. And the middling tempos are only partly to blame. "Wild Wild Horses" leans on a metaphor that, let's face it, will never be pried from the Rolling Stones' Sticky Fingers.

That said, When Life Gives You Lemons still helps lift Atmosphere further out of indie-rap territory. The shaggy-dog narratives of ordinary people buffeted by everyday tragedies are still rare outside the genre, despite rap's origins in exactly that hue of storytelling. So even when Slug gives in to his inner corniness, we let him off the hook. Granted, the production makes the naturalism pill easier to swallow. Open-minded fans will thank Ant, whose piano-driven works ("Yesterday", the opening two tracks) and darkly pretty "Painting" reveal a mind keeping up with his partner's, amplifying and deepening and, in his phrase, Quincy-Jonesing the record's vistas of blue-collar melancholia.

[Laconic]

Quote from: Lord Funk aka Ron Burgundy on Yesterday at 07:04:39 AM


Ha! That's awesome. Just proves my point about how great the song writing is here - even for people like me who just take the lyrics on face value, it still works brilliantly. Hey Laconic - can you point me to the interview where Slug breaks down the tracks like this? Thanks man.

Here ya go:


The story: More than a decade into a career that has seen Atmosphere become a titan of the underground rap world, the pair figured it was time for a little optimism. "The whole purpose of hip-hop in the first place was to make the best of things," Slug says. "You had a whole lot of disenfranchised, disempowered people with plenty of things to worry about coming together in parks and basements to party and forget about their problems."

The CD-release show: Atmosphere has yet to schedule a local concert but will host an April 22 midnight opening

Atmosphere

Video: Guarantees
Video: Shoulda Known
at Fifth Element (2411 Hennepin Ave. S., Mpls.) where Daley and Davis will meet fans and hand out free swag.
1.) "Like the Rest of Us"

Slug: "We wanted to make a quieter album, and that was one of the songs that sparked it all off. I should note, we made a double album. But I realized how ridiculous that is today. I missed my chance. I should've done that five years ago. But it focused things."

2.) "Puppets"

Slug: "There's no drums for so long, you never know if they're going to hit. When they do finally hit, it's, like, 'Here we go, the album is starting.' I see the first song as more of an intro than an actual song. The lyrics come from a conversation I had with a friend of mine about the Minneapolis

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music scene. I was so disappointed in the things he had to say. Hopefully, he'll hear this and hear my side of the conversation, since he wasn't trying to hear me that day."
3.) "The Skinny"

Slug: "This song is not really about a pimp. It's actually about cigarettes. I've been fighting with cigarettes for a long time, and, you know, I'm still on the loser's end of it. But I kind of figured if I write a song about cigarettes and how much they're pimping me, that could be the

Listen to the the new album from:
Atmosphere
Cloud Cult
Tapes 'n Tapes
motivation (to quit)."
4.) "Dreamer"

Slug: "It's a move into some poppier stuff than what me and Ant usually do. I think it's important to show those sides of us as long as we show them for the right reasons. There's another song, 'You,' that comes later, and it's twice as poppy. I wanted 'Dreamer' to come before 'You' so it transitions you and doesn't just smack you in the head."

Ant: "It was a b—— to do. I had a hard time coming to grips with that song."

5.) "Shoulda Known"

Slug: "When Ant played me the beat, it reminded me of Prince. Like the 'Dirty Mind' era. So, I knew I wanted to make a real dirty, racy song. But I didn't want to get too dirty and racy, because I'm getting too old for that s—-. So, I had to figure out how to make a gross song without too much drug stuff and too much sex stuff. I used the narrative to imply the grossness of the story. There's still the f-word in the chorus, and there's a couple other words that aren't, you know, happy words. It's an old song. I almost feel like what I'm saying coulda, shoulda, woulda been said on 'You Can't Imagine How Much Fun We're Having' back in '05. It's kind of a cheater."

6.) "You"

Slug: "It's the poppiest s—- I've ever done. And it scares me because I don't know what people are going to think about it. The funny thing is I don't consider what people are going to think when I'm making it, but once it's done and there's nothing left I can do about it, that's when I start to get neurotic. It is (fellow rapper Brother) Ali's favorite song on the record. His wife told me he sings the chorus around the house. To me, it can't get no better than that."

Ant: "It was fun to do. It's a couple of people just laughing and having fun. Hopefully, that comes through."

7.) "Painting"

Slug: "Ant knew someone who played lap steel guitar, so we used it to capture a certain (darkness). It may be the first time a lap steel guitar is used in a rap song."

8.) "Your Glasshouse"

Slug: "I don't want to say it's trendy, but it's contagious for everybody to take issue with what's going on in this presidential administration. It's become the new thing, when even losers like myself started to pay attention to politics. That was a sign to me. But every time I've tried to say something socially worthy, it always comes off preachy, and I don't like being that guy. I never really did a great job of alluding to what the song's really about. For the most part, I think people are going to think it's about a hangover. My friend Tunde (Adebimpe) of TV on the Radio sings backup vocals on it. It's real subtle. I thought he stole the show from me, which is the only reason I turned him way down."

9.) "Yesterday"

Slug: "It's the most optimistic beat on the album, and I wanted to write a sad song on top of this happy piano joint. It's about missing someone and really coming to terms with what that means. It's about my dad."

10.) "Guarantees"

Slug: "We did a benefit for a friend of ours maybe a year or so ago. I didn't want to bring the whole band up into this small, small venue, so just me and the guitar player took a bunch of my songs and made quick vocal/guitar renditions of them. This is one of the songs we did, and we liked it so much we decided to record it. It's one take. It told the story."

11.) "Me"

Slug: "It balances 'You.' It's pretty self-explanatory. I called it 'Me' because it's about me. I feel like it should be the be-all end-all of me writing any more songs about relationship turmoil or my co-dependencies. It's, like, 'This is how I am, this is why I'm like this.' So hopefully, it'll sink in to myself and help self-fulfill my prophecy of eventually running for mayor. You guys are laughing at that, that's great."

12.) "Wild Wild Horses"

Slug: "If you listen to the chorus, you could see why I actually looked into tracking down Tom Jones to sing it with me. I mean, I didn't go too far, but I looked into it. That song gave me a glimpse into what my life is going to be like when I actually do have to go work in Vegas. Because it's coming. I'm not going to quit, ever. Even when they fire me, I'm just going to go to Vegas."

13.) "Can't Break"

Ant: "This was probably the biggest challenge. It's based on a sample, and we were trying to find the original sound they made. We had maybe 10 synthesizers, all kinds of them. We had two keyboardists, me, (guitarist) Nate (Collis) and our engineer Joe (Mabbott) all playing."

Slug: "You should've seen all five of them playing synths at the same time. It looked like Devo."

14.) "The Waitress"

Slug: "Tom Waits beatboxes on it. I'm friends with his son. We've known each other for quite a while now, going on five or six years. And I finally asked him, I think literally, 'Have I known you long enough now to ask if I can get in touch with your dad? Or is that offensive?' So, I sent him the song and asked if he'd sing the chorus. He sent it back and totally avoided the chorus, but instead beatboxed on it. And it sounds good. It worked. We kept it subtle. I didn't want to be exploitive. I wanted to make sure it made sense musically, and I think ultimately it really did."

15.) "In Her Music Box"

Slug: "It's about a little girl who learned how to use and abuse escapism through music. It finishes the story. When we made this song, I knew the minute it was finished it would be the last song on the album."

[Tay]

I just finally really listened to this album a couple times, and it's good. "Your Glasshouse" is amazing, I really like "Dreamer", and it's a very nice set of work, might even be their most complete album to date, we'll see how it holds up to numerous listens.

[Lord Funk]

Played this the other day for the first time in a few weeks. Still the best album of 08 so far...