The Elephant's Bones was a true event album — a long-awaited meeting of two hip-hop legends. It lived up to the hype in stunning fashion: a minimalist work that quivered and smoldered more than it slapped. Although it bore the stylistic signatures of its creators, Roc Marciano and Alchemist, the album stood apart from their respective catalogs. Instead of jumbled soul loops and gritty boom-bap, this was mob rap tuned from Tibetan bowls. Al provided a pineal-stimulating ventilation through which Marci floated like the ghost of a king. Two years later, after pursuing their solo careers, Al and Marci are back together The skeleton keya weirder, grimmer, more hermetically sealed take on street rap prestige. There is no bloat, no guests, no unnecessary sounds. Each of its 10 songs feels like peering around a dark corner, an inescapable threat that suffuses every moment.
After finding a collective voice with The Elephant's Bonesthe pair settled into a comfortable rhythm, tapping into a simmering artistic connection. “We're always making music,” Marci explained Rolling Stone. “I'm always sitting on a batch of beats from Al.” The almost constant workflow makes them The skeleton key the product of a shared musical composition that only comes from a deep and continuous creative practice. On this leaner, meaner second record, Al's beats are spacious yet fragile, peeling back layers of samples until only a groove remains. Marci writes with laser-cut precision, his rhyming patterns meshing together like the gears of an expensive wristwatch. When a song has a chorus, it usually ends a long, awful monologue. It all adds up to an almost unbreakable tension.
If The Elephant's Bones was the soundtrack to a jewelry heist for a last job, The skeleton key it's the white knuckle, bullet-sweat afterwards. Alchemist excels at pinpointing the most disturbing parts of a song—a minor-key piano arrangement here, an anxious drum fill there—and wrapping them around to heighten their unease: Think the creepy, dissonant, four-chord vamp that carries the “Chopstick” or the blaring horn that cuts through Rhodes' gentle noodling on “Street Magic.” “Chateau Josué” has a reductive quality, as if its greasy synth line and insistent kick were part of a ritual to wake the dead. Most impressive is “Cryotherapy,” a wind tunnel of moaning vocals and what sounds like a harp glissando compressed into an eerie scream. Drums, if present at all, often feel several rooms away. The voices are recognizably human but bent into strange shapes. It's one of Al's more spartan works, but it's still as colorful, psychedelic and creepy as a grandpa death scene.
