RPxSB Drop Shaggy Carpets
By Deuce
RPxSB have returned with another album. This one is entitled Shaggy Carpets. However, this time they’ve teamed up with producer Nomadic for a whopping eight tracks, which includes one that’s barely a minute and another that’s less than two minutes.
The former is likely notable for jacking the piano, and parts of the strings, of Xzibit’s “The Foundation”. Nearly 20 years after the release of that single and video, RPxSB and their producer have recycled it for “Ode to the Gvng”.
As is the case on the majority of the album, the rhymes on this one are comprised of one liners that start and stop right on cue for each bar. The emcees also have a tendency to incorporate a fair amount of space in their lines. One of them does so with enough space to say the final word of the line (in repetition) as a means of background vocals. One can almost hear the pair thinking these things up.
“Planet X” is perhaps the most musically diverse cut on this collection. It sounds as though someone is playing live guitar on it, after an introduction—which sets off the album—with someone talking. This tune features Ron Bluu.
The bulk of the production on this project consists of immense chords that sound like sampled keyboards or some form of synths. Consequently, the music is fairly mellow, with cool out type tracks such as the titular offering and “Detrimental”. The latter has a bass line on it in addition to the big chords. “Shaggy Carpets” duplicates this formula without the bass line, and proves fodder for more proclamations of “niggas” from one—and it appears to be only one of the emcees—which is another motif on this offering.
Another characteristic is the dirty sounding drums, almost all of which sound like samples, which was oftentimes found in rap music from around the same epoch in which Xzibit’s tune was getting played on cable TV. It’s curious that RPxSB would choose to revisit some of these historical approaches to rap in the present decade.
