The Professionals (Instrumental)

Chronique

In a way, it's surprising that Madlib and Oh No didn't make an album together until 2020. Before then, the prolific and synergistic siblings connected here and there on isolated tracks dating back to the Oh No features on Lootpack's 1999 cult classic Soundpieces. Almost a decade later, they made their first appearance as the Professionals on King of the Wigflip and returned briefly a few years after that with Nittyville. Given the artists' vast, constantly diverging output, the Professionals name remained obscure until the arrival of this self-titled album on Madlib Invazion. With Madlib fresh off the Freddie Gibbs summit Bandana, and Oh No having just teamed with Blu for A Long Red Hot Los Angeles Summer Night, the brothers simultaneously add to their stacks of full-length duo LPs and put together a set that always sounds familiar but rarely less than fresh. Madlib produces and Oh No raps, joined on occasion by vets Chino XL and Elzhi and relative newcomer Adub. So much film dialogue, parodic content, stand-up comedy bits, tracks with vocals, soundboards, and wayward trash talk are threaded throughout that the extra voices sometimes overpower Oh No and company, or at least make the first few listens rather chaotic, if constantly amusing. The beats don't have quite as much variety as they do on Bandana, veering nonetheless with grace from placid to bolting and from elegant to savage, harvesting deep soul, funk, prog, and fusion pearls. There's the occasional welcome flashback to past Madlib projects, such as the Jamaica (N.Y.) funk that shimmers in "Away Too Long," repurposed and tweaked from Dil Cosby Suite to support some of the album's hardest rhymes. There and almost everywhere else, Oh No is armed with some of his keenest street preening, manifestly comfortable with his brother's work. Toward the album's conclusion, he takes it in a more serious direction with powerful reflections countering white supremacy and military recruitment.
© Andy Kellman /TiVo