New Album - Last 2 Walk by Three 6 Mafia

The Memphis rap group's latest album boasts appearances by Akon, Good Charlotte, DJ Unk, Lyfe Jennings, UGK, Al Kapone, Eightball, and MJG.

A couple of years ago it would have been easy to mistake the core members of Three 6 Mafia — Juicy J and DJ Paul — for rap stars. In 2005 they had their first pop hit, the sweeping and sinister “Stay Fly,” and in 2006 they won the Oscar for best original song, memorably performing “It’s Hard Out Here for a Pimp,” from “Hustle & Flow,” to an Academy Awards audience that didn’t seem quite sure if it was being punk’d: Who were these guys?

But Three 6 Mafia, from Memphis, had been making terrific, spooky albums for more than a decade, though it hadn’t had much success or recognition outside the South. After the Oscars Three 6 Mafia rode the wave of unlikely fame, excising an ancillary member, Crunchy Black, and moving to California to tape an MTV reality series, the occasionally amusing, more often uncomfortable “Adventures in Hollyhood.”

On that show Three 6 Mafia members were routinely portrayed as country folk not quite sure how to cope in the big city. And there is a slight residue of their “Hollyhood” days here, particularly “My Own Way,” a dismal team-up with ordinarily antic (but here gloomy) rock band Good Charlotte. But mostly, and thankfully, the group seems to have forgotten its brush with the limelight. Which is to say “Last 2 Walk,” its first album since the excellent “Most Known Unknown,” from 2005, sounds like vintage Three 6 Mafia: bruising production, gloriously foul-natured lyrics, single-minded focus on life’s pleasures — the humorously lewd “I’d Rather” and “Lolli Lolli (Pop That Body)” — all under a cloud of paranoia. “Play with your Playstation,” they warn, slightly absurdly, on “Playstation,” “Don’t play with me, boy.”

And yet, even when Three 6 Mafia menaces, it’s exuberant. Over the years it has learned to create minor key arrangements that bend in curious, exciting ways, seen here on “First 48” and “On Some Chrome,” a collaboration with UGK. (When Pimp C of UGK died in late 2007, he was in Los Angeles collaborating with Three 6 Mafia on tracks for this album.) Given the choices Juicy J and DJ Paul could have made — and for a time, did make — “Last 2 Walk” feels almost willfully obscure: in other words, right back where they belong

Nytimes.com