Album Review: Machetes & Micheladas by Coyote & Statik Selektah
The Hawthorne duo and Statik Selektah make bilingual boom bap that covers lotería, drive-by narratives, political fury, and letters to firstborn sons with the same flat-footed conviction.
Hawthorne, California is wedged into the South Bay between Inglewood and the ocean. Nobody from there has made a boom bap album like this one. Two brothers who grew up on Wu-Tang and Nas, split their childhood between the South Bay and Mexico while their parents got their footing, came back, and started writing raps after losing a championship basketball game. That’s the origin for LadiesLoveGuapo and Ricky Blanco, who record together as Coyote. The name doubles up—the trickster from Aztec mythology, and the person paid to smuggle you across the border. They own a barbershop on Melrose. Machetes & Micheladas, their fifth full-length, is the first where they gave the entire production slate to a single outside hand, Statik Selektah, the Massachusetts DJ who’s been supplying East Coast sample chops for twenty years.
Statik’s drums never disappoint, giving the duo a wide variety of sounds that deliver kicks with real weight, soul and jazz loops chopped tight. Guapo and Ricky trade bars in English and Spanglish with a looseness that almost looks careless until the punchlines connect. “I make this shit look like it’s butter, make it look like mantequilla” is a bilingual joke they toss off and keep moving, never slowing down to let you catch the translation. Conway the Machine turns up on “Give Me a Hell Yeah!” with a verse about a car interior that’s “mango on the inside, outside of it was tajín,” silk pajamas and Tracy Chapman playing, guns in the club with switches. The Morales brothers demand ten million and a jet ski from labels, liken running from feds to Cinderella, and call themselves walking red flags. They’re funny and they are also not kidding. On “Blasphemy,” Guapo puts himself next to Jesus Christ’s clone (“I hang with hookers and crooks”) and declares his skin is made of Teflon, all while spitting like Cassidy in 2003.
Guapo wanted Jordans growing up and couldn’t get them. On “Cortez On My Feet,” which interpolates Nelly’s “Air Force Ones,” he lays out the whole shoe story. His mom bought one pair, he played so hard he tore them, went to Ross the next day, found nylon Cortez on the half-off rack, fell in love. He hit the surplus store for a pro club, had his brother fade his hair and line him up, walked into school and every girl told him he was fly. Lil Mr. E from Foos Gone Wild hops on the same track about grinding in his Cortez “until Chicanos hit the lotto” and mentions Mr. Cartoon’s Nike collab. “Cali Dreaming” rattles off the Slauson Swap Meet, the Rhodium, eating at Chente’s where the food has too much sodium, a homie overdosing on opium and laughing about it, getting jumped in a bathroom at 13 for wearing a red hoodie with a sports team. Everybody on this album knows somebody paralyzed from the waist down.
Locksmith, on “What’s Peace?,” figures if Jesus Christ showed up tonight they’d probably deport him. R.A. the Rugged Man, on the same song, swings at people scared of Black mermaids, Bad Bunnies, and Bud Lights, calls out DHS remigration, and equates daily Oval Office meetings with Jerry Springer episodes. The Morales brothers opened that track, flipping Biggie’s “What’s Beef?,” by asking their own questions: locking kids up for stealing food, shooting people reaching for registration, letting pedophiles out while weed sellers rot.
The Morales brothers and their guests pick fights with specific targets, which means the track will sound like 2026 forever, and that’s fine. “Kid Named Johnny” commits to a full narrative, starting with a straight-A student whose father catches a drive-by, then tracing his slide into a gang for the fatherly love he lost, a stabbing in ninth grade, Vicodin from doctors, a Glock from his set, a shooting where he hits his target in the windpipe. He watches the target’s mother fall to her knees holding her baby. It’s the most complete piece of writing either brother has put on a record.
Guapo writes his firstborn a letter on “Letter to My Son.” Be compassionate but not weak, look a man in the eyes when shaking his hand, it’s OK to cry but be careful who sees it. He remembers the kid’s small fingers gripping his thumb the day God put the first breath in his lungs. Berner pens his own—he almost died in 2022, stayed alive for his son, tells him to raise an empire but to have fun getting there. “Love Me Love Me Not” wanders somewhere nastier: comparing tying the knot to putting his head in a noose, calling the love language verbal abuse, asking for a back rub instead of backstabbing. Alicia Marie fires back, hoping he dies in the bathtub she cried in, and admits she still loves him anyway.
Sick Jacken, on “Whippin’ Cream,” talks about making sobriety his new high after three decades, his parents from Sinaloa. B-Real introduces the brothers as “the pride of Hawthorne” on “Church,” where they kick ten commandments of the street: hate is cancer, charge a fee for your time, take from the rich, don’t snitch, take your Ls to the chin. B-Real and Sick Jacken sharing a song is a Psycho Realm reunion by proximity, and Conway, Curren$y, R.A. the Rugged Man, and Daylyt each brought their best sixteen to a record they could have sleepwalked through. Nobody sleepwalked.
Great (★★★★☆)
Favorite Track(s): “Whippin’ Cream,” “Kid Named Johnny,” “Cortez On My Feet”