Seven's Travels

For a good portion of the early ’00s, Slug was pigeonholed as “emo rap” — this was back when it was an epithet directed at a niche underground subgenre and not, say, Drake — thanks to his major lyrical fixations on relationship drama and self-effacing frustration. But Atmosphere’s 2003 album Seven’s Travels feels like something of a pivot point. After the unremitting bitterness of God Loves Ugly, he’s in the process of working out a lot of his feelings, even as (or maybe because) his audience was starting to grow from college-kid insularity to the kind of punk-conversant indie rap group that could play Warped Tour three years running. If it wasn’t clear enough from the outset — second track “Trying to Find a Balance” features Slug muttering “Atmosphere finally made a good record/Yeah right, that shit almost sounds convincing,” then spends the rest of the album actually showing off that conviction — his travelogue gets hectic the deeper it goes. It can get pretty raw, from the way “The Keys To Life Vs. 15 Minutes Of Fame” pits his successful-artist gratitude against his public-figure anxiety to the way “Suicidegirls” turns a furious girlfriend’s voicemail (“OK, and #2, being fucked up is not an excuse to piss in the goddamn fishtank”) as a way to confront how others see his hedonistic recklessness. But he has some powerful reckonings with something resembling maturity when that mood recedes just enough, taking opportunities to reflect on the difficult conflict resolutions of young love (“Lift Her Pull Her”) or find the comedic feebleness in a bad hookup (“Shoes”) or realize that the world being far bigger than he ever assumed also means there’s more room for people who understand him (“In My Continental”). And he’s got solid backup: eternal beatmaking partner Ant provides yet another slate of tracks that put him in the Greatest Producer Everyone Forgets About conversation, with the fuzzbox doom-rock hyperventilation of “Cats Van Bags” and the live-band-aided tipsy stagger of “Gotta Lotta Walls” repping the best weirdo outliers on an album that also serves up a good amount of high-caliber classic soul breaks. It all closes on a finale that still feels like the best way into his world — the two-fer of “Always Coming Back Home To You” and hidden bonus track “Say Shh,” where he looks at his Minneapolis community as a reflection of who he is and decides he wants to rep it with a genuinely humane kindness.