ARTS
The Michigan Daily - Tuesday, June 1, 2004 - 11
Method Man underwhelms on Tical 0
By Evan MGarvey
Daily Arts Writer
CorteyDryie-.Thru
Tool, tool, loser, tool, tool ...
Catalyst lacks hooks
By Hussain Rahim
Daily Arts Writer
Mus ic R EVI EW *'I F
Menace is so fleeting a quality that,
once lost, is impossible to regain. At
the dawn of his career, Method Man
loomed as a bold,
powerful and Method Man
almost sinister
member of the TicalIO: TheI
Wu-Tang clan. His Prequele
verses on that Def Jam
group's ground-
breaking debut, Enter the Wu-Tang...,
felt like the musings of a playfully
grimy street demon.
His solo ventures have given little
more than haunting glimpses into a
talent either too complacent or too dis-
tracted by a passion for weed to put
together a disc with any sort of vigor.
Tical 0: The Prequel is so long
delayed that one has to wonder if per-
haps Meth's obsession with Mary Jane
hasn't thrown him irreparably off
course. Swollen with top-shelf guests
such as Ludacris, Busta Rhymes and
Missy Elliot, Method Man feels more
like a visitor than the marquee name.
No hooks really catch; no verses have
any memorable devices or punch-
lines. "Rodeo" has a tired Method and
a Ludacris cameo that's raunchy even
for Luda.
Possessor of a timeless flow,
Method Man can tether himself to any
beat thrown his way. The vowels and
syllables spill from his mouth and sink
into each rise and fall of the beat. His
voice and the music pull together in a
patchwork of rhythmic cascades. The
endurance of his flow never lets any
one song plummet into complete
inanity, even when it probably should.
"The Turn" and "Afterparty" have
Raekwon and Ghostface reviving their
comrade's palate for growling danger.
Such moments of ashy fire are snuffed
out under the weight of too many
other cast-offs.
On a larger scale, this album reiter-
ates a trend spreading through so
many charismatic and commercially
prominent MCs. With success in
movies, male hygiene products and a
soon-to-be-short-lived sitcom starting
this summer, Method Man just does-
n't seem to have time for rap songs.
His upward mobility and name-
brand recognition notwithstanding,
MM may have just spent too much
time around his better (and even
more blunted) half Redman to keep
his swagger. When they team with
Snoop Dogg on "We Some Dogs,"
these three sublimely talented rap-
pers all toss out redundant canine
analogies and sniff around for
roaches.
The clanking danger of the early
Method Man slips further and fur-
ther away and nothing seems to be
radiating from him except a stoner's
spare tire.