Two albums from Warren G protogees here, both of which featured on Warren G's Regulate...The G Funk Era last summer. You *all* know what G Funk sounds like by now, so lets cut to the chase.
Nobody produces G Funk better than Warren G, so The Twinz are off to a good start with the deepest bass, sweetest soul background vocals and lushest funk guitar and needling synths that money can buy.
The Twinz are more yer straight G Funksters - the lyrics little more than a series of slint-eyed threats with a straight flow that sacrifices show-off skills for calm, chilled clarity. If anything, it's all a little bit too familiar - G Funk, by definition, being a self-limiting genre. But whilst there's crystalline beauty like "Eastside LB" with its poignancy above and beyond the call of duty which reeks of end-of-summer nights, the inspired female rap of The Five Footahs' Neb and Jah Skillz who trade lines with the boys and win hands down, and the lush orchestration and paranoid synth whine of "1st Draft Pick", there isn't too much to complain about.
The Dove Shack aren't (with the exception of the one track) produced by Warren G, but the variety of people that get their hands on the beats give this one a more varied feel and move it away from G Funk on several occasions, throwing up a few surprises with a nice dark edge. The band claim they're coming from a freestyling background but it sounds a little like a grasp at extra credibility rather than 100% truth.
Still, they can flow when they try and there's a handful of top stuff like the west-coast meets horror-core vibe of "Bomb Drop", the pleasantly upbeat "East Side Party", and pleasantly dark "Rollin Wit a Gang". What spoils the overall vibe though is enough mysoginistic bullshit to make Dr Dre sound like Germaine Greer with songs such as "Fuck Ya Mouth", and a surfeit of skits such as the advert for a device called "Slap-a-Hoe". Worst of all though is supposedly humorous "The Train" skit which basically amounts to gang rape of an unsuspecting girlfriend and for which we can only hope the lads themselves get raped in jail one day.
The G Funk sound is still lush, and for fans of the West Coast this'll be like a birthday, but its hard not to think of G Funk as last year's sound. I know that, personally, the blunted paranoia of the East Coast - people like Mobb Deep, The Wu-Tang Collective, The Gravediggaz, Nas, and Jeru the Damaja and the rest of the Gang Starr clique - say far more to me about the city I live in than this low-ride malevolent sunshine. But that's just me. If G-Funk's your thing, prepare to bob your head.
