Album Review: AL-ANDALUS by Cookin Soul & Estee Nack
The narcotics talk on this rapper-producer album is so granular it reads like a shipping manifest, and every page is worth examining.
Most of the drug talk here comes down to work. Not the mythology of the drug trade, not the lifestyle—the job. Somebody cuts a hundred grams off a brick of white and almost misses a flight. A plug fronts a bad batch and tries to collect predatory credit. Heroin junkies get served and later they die. Estee Nack, a first-generation Dominican-American rapper from Lynn, Massachusetts, has been filling albums with this kind of granular narcotics accounting since his 2015 debut 14 Forms and through a run of collaborations with Sadhugold, V Don, Giallo Point, and Conductor Williams that made him a familiar name in the same underground that Roc Marciano and Mach-Hommy built. His 2023 Griselda debut Nacksaw Jim Duggan, executive produced by Westside Gunn, gave him the biggest co-sign of his career. AL-ANDALUS, produced entirely by the Valencia-raised, Amsterdam-based Cookin Soul, gives him something different. Cookin Soul’s beats pull from jazz horns, Latin congas, and operatic vocal samples, and Nack raps over all of them the same way he raps over everything.
Cookin Soul is David Garcia, born in Madrid to an Armenian-Catalan family, raised in Valencia from age four. He connected with American rappers through MySpace around 2002, got an early placement with The Game, and has since put out twenty-five-plus vinyl releases with Freddie Gibbs, Mac Miller, Joey Bada$$, Conway the Machine, and others. A Latin Grammy in 2013 for Mala Rodríguez’s Bruja. A YouTube channel with over 580,000 subscribers. He lives in Amsterdam now with his wife MC Melodee and their three children, and weeks before this dropped, he produced Italian rapper GUÈ’s FAST LIFE 5 – Audio Luxury, which debuted at number one in Italy across streaming, digital, and physical sales. The title references the medieval Arabic name for Muslim-ruled Iberia, the territory that included the Valencia where Cookin Soul grew up.
At the end of “Touchin Base,” a local news clip reports shots fired and people injured in Lynn at 2:20 in the morning. Before that, Nack has spent two verses explaining the business that produces those headlines. A plug fronted him a bad batch. “A lot of credit was predatory.” He served a couple heroin junkies and heard they died after. He describes good friends turning into “satanic folks” when they see you making money and they’re broke, and waiting on West Coast packages from somebody named Zack, breaking them down for public consumption. On “More or Less,” he meets junkies at the methadone clinic after they’ve missed their dose. The hook tells him to take a breath and feel the bones in his body flex after the money stress. On “Bread & Wine,” there’s a P.O. box full of cocaine and flour and gelato runs in Dade and Broward counties after midnight. Nack knows who his customers are, what routes the packages travel, which batches are good and which ones are predatory, and how many grams come off a single brick. He sells drugs the way other rappers describe getting dressed.
Nack’s English and Spanish share the same heritage. On “Santeria,” he calls out weak company and follows it with “mala mia,” a casual apology, before dropping “en esta tienda no se fia,” a phrase any Dominican bodega customer would recognize, meaning this store gives no credit. On “Inbound,” he tells someone “te llenaste de odio,” which means you filled yourself with hate, and goes right back to rapping about Mediterranean water and gold chains. On “Bread & Wine,” a customer hits a sample of product, almost passes out, and the aside is “casi le dio un patatús.” The Spanish moves through the English the way it would in a kitchen in Lynn or a barbershop in Washington Heights. “Telex Free Trap” references the real TelexFree pyramid scheme that Dominican immigrants in Massachusetts ran before the feds shut it down in 2014. Nack’s version: “Dominicans run the pyramid schemes like Telefree/Pay off a cop but he might just let it be.” The line is funny, local, and completely unbothered by whether you know what TelexFree was.
Cookin Soul’s beats vary more than Nack’s subject matter does. “La Bomba” rides congas and bongos under a vocal loop that repeats without changing, and Nack matches the looseness by boasting about customer service and Versace shirts with the chest hairs showing. “More or Less” opens with an operatic vocal that sounds like it belongs on a gladiator movie trailer before settling into a smoother groove. “Carlitos Way” samples dialogue from the Pacino film and backs it with a high-pitched vocal chop that stays floating behind Nack’s entire verse. “Touchin Base” has a piano sample that sounds like somebody playing in a room with the windows open, and then the news report replaces it. The drums stay in boom-bap territory throughout. There are snares and kicks on every song, no drumless loops, but the samples that sit on top of them change enough to move through moods on their own schedule. “Telex Free Trap” drops the tempo and adds weight, and Cookin Soul gives it to Yung Beef to match.
Yung Beef, Cookin Soul’s longtime collaborator from their Los Papasitos duo in Spain, takes “Telex Free Trap” and raps his entire verse in Spanish, calling himself a miracle from the barrio, mixing Galliano with Margiela, his grandmother’s candles on the altarito, joseando in San Mandela and then in Tangier with Fatima. Lil Supa, a Venezuelan MC, shows up on “Bread & Wine” and announces that the best collaboration on the album is the Venezuelan, “la mejor colabo del álbum es el venezolano,” then calls the whole thing a French bakery, only baguette, and points at his own reflection like Vincent Cassel. Planet Asia, from Fresno, calls his cadence coke on “Ghost in the Lab.” The Five Percenter bars go down the same way Nack’s do, as furniture in the room, not sermons from the pulpit.
The drug talk stops on “Hear Me.” Nack raps about a young person who resorts to crime and ignores the signs, about the government closing schools and opening jails, and the hook talks to a mother: “Mama, listen to your sons/we was in need of love and now we playing with guns.” He says all of this wearing an Armani piece that hasn’t dropped yet. “Carlitos Way” samples Pacino dialogue and turns autobiographical. Bummy to Balmain, coppers with wires, unidentified bodies in lakes and rivers, top five lists he says he doesn’t care about anymore. The last clip from the film: “You ain’t like me, motherfucker, you a punk.” And “La Poli” closes with a spoken-word debate about whether you should run from police if you’re innocent, a question the rest of the album already answered.
On paper, a single MC rapping about the same subject over one producer’s beats for a full-length should lose you by the middle. On “Touchin Base,” Nack fills the hook with “what’s the word?” and then spends three minutes answering it with Bolivian flake and predatory credit and friends turning satanic when they see you caking. On “La Bomba,” the question is “you didn’t know I was the bomb, baby?” and the answer is a customer service record, a Versace shirt, and operations carefully calculated and properly executed. Cookin Soul moves the samples that no two tracks sit in the same pocket, and Nack fills the verses with enough names and weights and routes that the bars hold up on a third listen. That’s AL-ANDALUS.
Great (★★★★☆)
Favorite Track(s): “Touchin Base,” “Telex Free Trap,” “More or Less”