Yahoo! Music Album Review

Released on 18/12/06
Label: Def Jam

It's only fair. With the release of his second brilliant album in ten months, we have to add Dennis Coles in the mid-'00s to that short but storied list of alarmingly over-productive musicians which includes mid-'60s Dylan and early-'70s Stevie. In those contexts, if March's "Fishscale" was his "Highway '61 Revisited" or "Innervisions", "More Fish" is "John Wesley Harding" or "Fulfillingness' First Finale". It may lack something of the lustre, but it's still a gem from a master operating very much at the peak of his powers.

There's so many things that single Ghostface out from the rap pack that it often seems like he's created his own sub-genre. Certainly, these days, nobody does it like Ghost; his style is so flashy, his rough edges so much a believable part of a complex package rather than something crassly appended to make him seem more interesting, that you're compelled to cut him more slack. In a brilliant cover feature in the current edition of "Hip Hop Connection" magazine, James McNally notes that what would seem like cringeworthy excess in lesser hands is stuff you don't even think to call Ghost out on.

So while "Josephine" dwells, like Brand Nubian's patronising "Slow Down" did years ago, on the dubious issue of how crack ruins people's lives but cute girls' more so, Ghost infuses his rhymes with such transparently genuine care that the problematic sexual politics don't seem like an issue. Similarly, on one level, "Greedy Bitches" is just the same old misogynist crap that sounded painful in the 1980s, yet Ghost's insouciance and playfulness - and the fact that, rather than condemning gold-diggers, it's an attack on women who aren't interested in doin' the nasty until they've eaten their man out of house and home - make it work

More piecemeal and slightly less cohesive than "Fishscale", "More Fish" gives deserved time to Coles's Theodore Unit accomplices, just as Eminem used "The Re-Up" to preview his new compadres. The difference is that any one of the Theodores give the impression they could eat those new Shady emcees for breakfast. Trife Da God we already know, but the revelation here is Sun God, Ghost's teenage son, who raps with barrel-chested assurance and even spars effectively with pops on the blazing "Street Opera".

There are conceptual tours de force (the Ghost-in-Hollyweird "Alex (Stolen Script)" confirming Coles is the best screenwriter the movies never had), virtuoso rap displays ("Ghost Is Back", three new verses splattered liberally over Rakim's "Know The Ledge" instrumental), and even old-school-styled songs that offer no concessions to the mainstream yet could so easily become hit singles (like "Pokerface", in which Ghost sings the chorus while Shawn Wiggs, another impressive Theodore, bigs up his card-playing prowess). The only thing missing is a surreal confection to match "Fishscale"'s "Underwater": the rest is simply a delight.

    by Angus Batey