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Freddie Gibbs and Madlib: Bandana review – rap’s odd couple fall flat

(Keep Cool/Columbia)

American rapper Freddie Gibbs and producer Madlib, known for his work with Talib Kweli, J Dilla and MF Doom, first collaborated on 2014’s acclaimed Piñata. Gibbs, born and raised in Indiana, has some of the spiky, conversational flow of Jay-Z but lacks the New York rapper’s ability to bring images and ideas to life with words. On this sequel, Gibbs mostly sounds bored, aggressively bored or boringly aggressive.

The ever creative Madlib chucks in everything he can find to dazzle the listener. When this coheres – in the vicious swamp-beat of Massage Seats, for example – it’s sensational. Often his work sounds too dense to compete with mass-market trap, and struggles to support Gibbs’s gruff rhymes.

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