Pitchfork

Like so many other May-December relationships, Buckshot & 9th Wonder spend plenty of time reminding us just how awesome their relationship is. The problem is that great duos in hip-hop never need to tell everyone just how intuitively combustible they are. When the upright Boot Camp Clik foreman hooked up with Little Brother's young-buck-producer 9th Wonder for their debut album, 2005's Chemistry, the logic was simple: youthful, nostalgic producer meets veteran, respected MC flickering into obscurity. 9th Wonder, then at the tail-end of his productive partnership with Little Brother and its loveless, snarky MCs (Phonte and Big Pooh, for the record) had bumped into Buckshot during a studio session. He confessed his boyhood fandom (9th was eighteen when Black Moon's 1993 debut dropped). Buckshot, grateful, applauded the young producer's commitment and acumen in crate-digging. The compulsory promises to try and find a project together are forgone. That very day the savvy rookie and the vet get into the booth, and voila, the lion's share of their feeling-out process became, as they reminded us, time and time again, Chemistry.

The album was filled with sturdy, backward-looking prescriptions: Buckshot's effortlessly wry punch lines and 9th Wonder's trotting, sample-heavy beat scholarship. Their follow up, this year's The Formula, doesn't twist, invert, or spin their unwavering relationship. The album is an unforced renewal of vows-- vows with the same gaps and same peaks they had since they set out together. Even when a track on The Formula isn't an explicitly rote café love song-- and that's only about half the songs-- the psychology is meek hope, faint pride, reserve. Buckshot settles for his old preferences-- fists versus guns, 'dro versus yeyo-- and abstract praise for the struggle: "Time fly by/ Guess how many people tryin' to make it in the world/ So am I/ I can't lie, I be on the side like 'Yeah/ Anything moving I'm there'" ("Hold It Down").

Buckshot was never a rhetorical wizard like KRS or a stylist like Big L, but he sounds beyond cruise control, dangling sloppy enjambments and settling, the vast, vast majority of the time, for the easy, expendable simile or image ("Flip like pancakes"). 9th Wonder offers dutiful compositions, sticking to escalating woodwinds, and whiny, spring-loaded strings. Similar to his work on Little Brother's albums, 9th Wonder is a prodigy when it comes to vocal samples. The cooed hook on "No Future" glides like a flexed muscle in between the tin twinkles and tapped snares. "Just Display" has a smaller, more piecemeal vocal loop, but even there, 9th sneaks it into song's negative space, keeping the griddle-synths from overwhelming the sample.

But even with 9th's craftsmanship, the melodies, like Buckshot's lyrics are vacuum-sealed. There's a pianissimo modesty that positively sucks the album dry. Even Buckshot sounds like he knows how bland they are: "Steak and potatoes, all I need is gravy." The urge to not overwhelm one's partner is a good one, but there has to be some sense of imbalance, of strain or push, to make a partnership more than an endless parade of door holding and back-patting. The Formula never dares to expose a dynamic between 9th Wonder and Buckshot. All we get is a happy partnership-- inert, consistent and imminently forgettable.