Coathanga Strangla

Album Review

A line like “So when I’m comin’ in your window with a machete and a pistol/Best believe it’s just to get me a nut” is only sensible when it lands on a release from the Strange Music label. If that release happens to be a Brotha Lynch Hung album, then it’s probably the chorus, and a chorus with a wicked hook — as it happens to be on “The Coathanga,” one of the Coathanga Strangla album’s many highlights. This is the second part of a trilogy begun on Lynch’s previous blast of horror hip-hop, the slightly superior Dinner and a Movie. Here, things are just too dark for the faint of heart to be swayed, as “Mannibalector” gives a bite-by-bite lesson in anatomy while “Spit It Out” offers a serial killer’s version of “Cleanin’ Out My Closet,” although here, the skeletons are real. Fellow deviant Tech N9ne shows up on “Takin’ Online Orders,” which is drop-dead funny, but to make it to this late-in-the-game highlight, the listener must sit through plenty of sick story-spinning on a 21-track concept album, which is part of a concept album trilogy on top of it. Check Dinner and a Movie for a more accessible intro, and if there aren’t enough blood and guts on that horror show, come back here for something darker, dirtier, and if you’ve got the taste for it, more delicious.