Three 6 Mafia: Last 2 Walk

Since before they stepped out in 2000 with their

still-peerless cough-syrup anthem "Sippin' On Some Syrup," the members of Three

6 Mafia have commanded a style that might well be called baroque

crunk—with only the "crunk" part risking misrepresentation. The baroque

part proves sound, in the most florid sense of the term, beneath all the tense,

scary piano lines, tormented strings, and disembodied voices of rappers who

sound either dead or well on their way. But what kind of mafia thrives with

just two members When does an organization mean more than its individual

parts

These are questions that haunt Last 2 Walk, the first Three 6 Mafia

album since the group took home an Oscar for Best Original Song in a win sure to

stay in the annals of Academy Awards lore for the rest of time. As the intro to

Last 2 Walk tells

it, "only some could last through the pressure" of the aftermath—and so

Three 6 Mafia is now just DJ Paul and Juicy J. That might seem a minor point to

fixate on, especially as it relates to a hip-hop album with the requisite

expanding cast of collaborators, but prime Three 6 Mafia always drew on the mix

of manias and moods smuggled in by its foot-soldiers: the brassy sass of

Gangsta Boo, the zombie-walk stoicism of Crunchy Black, and so on.

Alas, DJ Paul and Juicy J drum up some passable

drama and dread to add to the coffers. "I Got" starts off as a bleary

synth-blitz with chilly cymbals before changing entirely into a piano-tickled

take on something like the Halloween theme. In "First 48," the piano clanks through

delirious circles before an actual horror-show organ enters in. But for all the

intricacy on display in the production, the vocals just aren't there: Very

little proves as engagingly or exhilaratingly macabre as past Three 6 hits, and

Last 2 Walk falls

back on a frustrating pattern of pat crunk call-and-response screams. (The

nadir comes when a chorus yells "Three!" in response to another shouting

"PlayStation!" over and over.) It all makes for an effect that's more taxing

than chilling.