Atmosphere - Southsiders (2014) / underground hip-hop, teasy, social

About 10 years ago, already well into a flourishing career, Sean Michael Daley decided to start moving the furniture around inside of his music. The bluster and self-evisceration of the early records Daley (aka Slug) made with producer Ant as Atmosphere suddenly bored him, so he set it aside and started penning compassionate character sketches while Ant warmed and loosened up their sound with live instruments. The results strayed from rap towards gently rambling spoken-word territory, but miraculously, the duo didn't lose their audience: 2008's resonant When Life Gives You Lemons You Paint That Shit Gold sold the most of any Atmosphere release and marked an unlikely new chapter in an already-unlikely career.

Southsiders extends the "quietly durable" phase of the Minneapolis duo's lifespan. The 2011 album The Family Sign, which featured the upraised fist of Daley's newborn second child on its cover, told stories that were close to his home while not being strictly about him—there were upsetting and finely detailed narratives of spousal abuse and breakups, but few first-person pronouns. Southsiders dials in closer: opening track "Camera Thief" finds him in his kitchen with his children. "I still kick it with angels, the only difference is/ Instead of the bar, I'm at my kitchen table," he raps. The line obliquely references "Angelface", a track from 2005's landmark You Can't Imagine How Much Fun We're Having that detailed tour conquests with self-loathing and relish. It establishes the creative challenge of Southsiders. Daley has two children, a kitchen table, and a domestic existence of sorts, and he's trying to figure out how to make an Atmosphere record about that.

The awkward, uninspired construction of that line hints at the creeping problem: Contentment is damnably hard to write about. For most of us, contentment is a gift, a welcome reason to rev down the whirring of our mental engines. We analyze our bad feelings because we're trying to figure out how to banish them, but we simply enjoy our good feelings. Daley is smart and self-aware enough to diagnose this problem on "Camera Thief": "I don't need my defensiveness/ I keep to myself, my family and friendships/ I got enough people I could disappoint/ If you disagree, I think you missed the point," he raps, defensively. But pointing to the problem doesn't dissolve it, and when he follows up with ""Now pull up a chair/ Let me tell you about the last few years," it's hard to muster a lot of excitement.

More distressingly, a spare tire of flab has developed around Slug's usually chisel-sharp writing. "Gotta be a model civilian/ And get your name printed on a bottle full of pills, and/ Spill your guts into a Dixie cup/ Give no fucks, kiss no butts," from "The World Might Not Live Through the Night", is a stretch that would never have made it onto an earlier Atmosphere record. "If everybody on the comet agreed/ We could set the clock to whenever we wanted it to be" is a nice sentiment, but not a terribly incisive thought, and when he throws it out on the gently bumping "Fortunate," it's hard not to flinch a little bit.

But even working at half-capacity, Daley hits some powerful nerve clusters. On "Arthur's Song," there are freeze-in-place images to savor like "Train tracks underneath the faceless moon" and some of his trademark writerly details: "Been a few years since the last cigarette, but if you put your finger inside the flask, it's still wet." "Time flew/ Like it's designed to do", from "Star-Shaped Heart," has a lovely, jewel-like simplicity.

There are a few moments where Slug revisits earlier versions of himself. On the curiously titled single "Kanye West", he revisits some well-trod codependency-addiction territory ("She said she want somebody she could take care of/ And right then is when we paired up"), and on the title track he throws out goofy battle raps ("Show me a player who's mad at this/ And I'll show you a hater and a masochist") like it's still 2005. The pinched fury of that era is long gone from Slug's voice, and the song feels downright affectionate, like a high-school picture, a fond look back at his "Whoever put out album must've needed write-offs" era. They foreground the album's lack of focus: For the first time in Atmosphere's long career, the stakes feel low, and Southsiders feels both pleasant and noncommittal, like it isn't even convinced of its own right to exist. ©