Slaughterhouse: What the Games Been Missin'

It's a rarity to see a group of young rappers with similar drive and focus set out to achieve a common goal. So you can understand my doubts when I first heard the mention of Slaughterhouse. Sure, it was a good idea in theory; four MCs at pretty much the same stage in their careers uniting to make an album to appease the people. But usually these things don't go as planned. How often do we hear these dudes throw out the "we should do an album together"when talking about a contemporary hip hop artist. I remained dubious when I learned the quartet who formed the group----Joe Budden, Joell Ortiz, Royce the 5'9', Crooked I. I never really listened to Joe Budden (mood music mixtapes weren't bad though), I had only heard a couple verses from Joell Ortiz, I listened to some old Royce when he was runnin with Em, but Crooked I is the only one I could truly say that I bumped. So although I was intrigued by the idea, I wasn't blown away about it.

Shout out to my boy Dub who put me on the the group. The first track I heard by the group was Onslaught, and I was very impressed. Each MC came with a different flavor and more than exceeded my expectations. I already knew that Crooked I was a murderer when it came to assailing the mic, but I was in the dark on the skills of the the remaining members. While I listened to each member leave their imprint, it dawned on me that they would all come to the table with their best material. There would be no way any one of these cats would want to be seen as the weakest link. Sure, you could choose your favorite verse, but you couldn't deny that they all came with it; Onslaught was a befitting title indeed and so was Slaughterhouse. So after several months of features and tracks being released by the group, I started to anticipate the release.

This group was for real and they built even more of a following while preforming on the Rock The Bells Tour. The self titled Slaughterhouse album is one of the best pure hip hop album's I've heard in quite sometime. They didn't follow the prototypical album formula: a commercial hit, a song for the club, the street banga and let's not for get the song or two for the ladies. What they did do was go all in on each track and while maintaining a topic for every song. Most rappers these days don't make any attempt to grow as artist and just put tracks on albums without any depth. So if you're looking for watered down run of the mill hip hop, don't buy this album. Because with this group, you get four artists who show that they still care about what they do and still posses passion for the music.