Happy 25th Anniversary to Artifacts’ second studio album That’s Them, originally released April 15, 1997.
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Artifacts’ commitment to making solid, no frills hip-hop deserves its recognition. During a period when mainstream hip-hop was becoming increasingly gimmicky and compromised, the Newark, NJ-based crew put out an album with no frills, strictly skills. That’s Them, released 25 years ago, is one of the few albums of this type during the era to receive a major label release. As a follow-up to a similarly underappreciated debut release, it centered on the group’s growth and commitment to making dope music.
Artifacts were made up of Rahem “Tame One” Brown, William “El Da Sensei” Williams, and Shawn “DJ Kaos” Perry, who didn’t join the group until after their debut, Between a Rock and a Hard Place (1994). With their second album, the group moved forward by evoking their past; “That’s Them” was the original name of the Tame and El duo, back when they first started recording music. Kaos makes a strong addition to the crew, adding his sharp cuts to nearly every track on the album.
That’s Them is a more refined project than Between a Rock and a Hard Place. The beats aren’t as dusty and raw, and the presentation is a little polished. However, it’s still an uncompromised dedication to boom-bap, as well as the group’s best album overall. Both Tame and El improved as emcees between albums. El’s leap is impressive, as he sounds much more comfortable on the microphone and his flows are much smoother. Meanwhile, Tame went from very good to giving one of the best (and unheralded) lyrical performances of the late 1990s.
That’s Them is largely single-minded in its scope. Tame and El home in on providing impressive lyrical displays, making the project consistent in tone. The crew knows what works best for them, and thus provide battle raps over head-nodding tracks.
Nearly half of That’s Them is produced by Shawn J. Period, who got his start as a member of the Virginia-based Down South, Artifacts’ labelmates on Big Beat/Atlantic. Shawn eventually became known for helping define the late 1990s East Coast-centered underground sound. His beats at the time were a mix of jazzy and spacy, packing a ton of infectious bounce.
Shawn J. is responsible for setting the album’s tone out of the gate. He hooked up the album’s de-facto opener and most successful single, “Art of Facts,” an eerie ode to raw rhyming ability. He follows with a solid and underappreciated run of tracks that includes “31 Bumrush” and “To Ya Chest.” The murky “Where Yo Skillz At?” is an understated masterpiece, with Shawn J. hooking up elastic percussion, muted flutes and horn trills. El sets things off right, rapping, “No tricks with fits, inflict the hurt like Frank Thomas / To never make the wack jams, to my peers I promise.” Tame is absolutely locked in, delivering a pair of lengthy verses that may be the best of his career. With a nimble and complex delivery, he raps, “Don't play me too close, you'll get roasted by the Human Torch from Newark / I’m blowing up spots without tour support.”
Artifacts work with members of Da Beatminerz crew multiple times on That’s Them. Baby Paul provided apt preview for That’s Them’s sound with his production on “The Ultimate.” The song first appeared on the High School High soundtrack (1996), released well in advance of their sophomore album. “It’s Getting Hot” is similarly dope, as Mr. Walt laces them with another solid mid-tempo groove, anchored by a vibraphone sample and stabs of guitar. On “Skwad Training,” Baby Paul hooks up rugged drums and adds some sprinklings of spacey keys and vibes. Tame One professes to “sabotage your entourage with a barrage of lyrical cheap shots at your weak spots,” while El boasts that he will “step on competition with my hollow-tip cleats.”
Tame and El do add their fair share of rugged material. “This Is Da Way,” produced by Beatnuts affiliate V.I.C., features Tame and El rhyming at their most aggressive, while Kaos contributes a barrage of high energy scratches on the turntables. “The Ultimate” remix, handled by D.I.T.C. member Showbiz, is as hard as a concrete brick. Beat-wise, it’s the embodiment of mid to late 1990s hardcore hip-hop, as Showbiz mixes neck-snapping drums with ghostly keys and blasts of horns. On the mic, Tame sums up Artifacts’ entire ethos, rapping, “I’m not in it for the gimmicks, satisfying critics / I just want my own like the Hasidics.”
El and Tame hold down almost all of the emceeing duties themselves throughout That’s Them. Only “Collaboration of Mics” features any guests, as the duo is joined by Lord Jamar and Lord Finesse, the latter of which produces the track. All four emcees pass the mic back and forth, kicking four to eight-bar verses. Jamar sounds energized, rapping, “Understand and add, triple cipher / N****s be crippled without some weed and a lighter.”
Tame One receives a solo track on the endeavor, the unorthodox “Ingredients of Time Travel.” Tame traipses through the track with a shifting, start-and-stop flow, unleashing a winding verse where each stanza interlocks with the one previous and afterwards, only broken up by scratches of Redman vocals. Gruff Rhino hooks up a busy yet low-key track, filled with keys, vibes, and blaring claxons.
Artifacts occasionally provide some rhymes not based around flexing their well-honed skills. “Return to da Wrongside” builds off of “Wrong Side of Da Tracks” from their debut LP. Rather than just celebrating graffiti culture, Tame and El provide a slice of their lives growing up, seeking out places to bomb and dealing with constant harassment by the NYPD.
On “The Interview,” produced by V.I.C., the pair continuously trade short verses, making their mission statement as emcees. ”Seeing that n****s wack, time to take it back to basics,” El raps. “Like Saucony sneakers or a pair of Asics.” Meanwhile, Tame emphatically states, “I paint a picture perfect with a thousand pencils / From the back of Continentals, Lincolns, drinking, thinking mental.”
This project was Artifacts’ final full-length as a group. Later that year, the group recorded a 12” under the name Brick City Kids through the then-fledgling Rawkus Records. They broke up shortly afterwards, for reasons that the two have never fully discussed.
Tame One and El have both enjoyed solid and expansive solo careers in the subsequent quarter century. Tame continued his association with Rawkus and the indie-label Eastern Conference, occasionally recording albums dedicated to his enthusiastic use of PCP. He spent time as a member of the Weathermen crew, a collective whose ranks included El-P, Cage, Camu Tao, and others. El Da Sensei released numerous solo albums through Fat Beats and has teamed up with peers like Sadat X to record a collaborative album. Both made dope material on their own, but I had always hoped for more music from them under the Artifacts moniker.
The crew has periodically reunited over the years, and at one point in the early 2010s signed with Redefinition Records with the intentions of releasing a long-awaited third album. The project never materialized. DJ Kaos tragically passed in 2019, and the group has gone silent since.
When I paid tribute to Between a Rock and a Hard Place, I mused that acts like Artifacts would never get a major label deal these days, and that it was small miracle that they got a chance to release a second album on the same label. Even if That’s Them didn’t overly appeal to as broad of an audience as possible, it’s fortunate that a group with as little pretension as possible had the chance to get their music to a widespread audience during the final days with a machine like WEA behind them. Like many of the boom-bap albums of the era, That’s Them possesses a timeless quality that will always appeal to those who love hip-hop music.
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