The moment Project Pat starts rapping on “Still the Same,” the first song on his and Juicy J’s new album, Dem Goats, it feels like champagne flutes should be bubbling over in celebration. “It ain’t gon’ never be the same now,” the 53-year-old Pat says with his whole chest, his voice carrying the sincerity and heft of age. As Hitkidd’s beat fades up, Pat meshes with the unbreakable Memphis groove, dropping into a familiar pocket. His staccato enunciations mirror the hi-hats, occasionally adding a grace note here and there, and when he nails his signature move—adding “-ah” to the end of a word and scooping out a lower octave—it’s like seeing a long-lost friend. Despite his status as an elder statesman of Southern rap, Pat has always been slightly overlooked, working under the shadow of his younger brother, Juicy J, and Three 6 Mafia, the mythic, deeply influential group Juicy started with DJ Paul in the 1990s. But Pat is indeed a legend, and hearing him sound so assured and comfortable eight years after his last dispatch is enough to make any rap fan giddy.
He and Juicy, despite working closely for the past three decades, have never made a proper full-length album together. Between 2009 and 2011, the brothers released a string of collaborative mixtapes, all of which were low-stakes fun (especially 2009’s DJ Drama-hosted Play Me Some Pimpin’ Mane Pt. 2). For Juicy, it was the beginning of a renaissance as a solo artist, signaling the druggy, Flockaveli-esque direction he’d take with Blue Dream & Lean. Pat, on the other hand, was in a creative wilderness throughout the late aughts and early 2010s, drowned out by ever-expanding widescreen production and often returning to the well of his early work with diminishing returns. Juicy rode stardom as high as a bizarre Katy Perry feature and eventually settled into a quieter lane, issuing serviceable albums that harkened back to his more minimalist origins. Pat’s output meanwhile slowed to a trickle, and he became a prison minister, visiting inmates across the South.
No score yet, be the first to add.
Though the album dropped with little fanfare, Dem Goats is not a throwaway. For the most part, it’s a solid return to form, a chance for the Bluff City hellraisers to remind everyone where so much of the contemporary rap palette originated. Juicy handles the lion’s share of production according to his unwavering sonic vision—it’s as though he ripped open a vacuum-sealed bag of hypnotic synth sequences, mellifluous soul samples, and mechanized drums and found them still fresh. If it weren’t for the pristine, spacious mixes signaling elevated budgets, most of these tracks wouldn’t sound out of place on albums like Layin’ Da Smack Down or When the Smoke Clears: Sixty 6, Sixty 1. A few nods to their foundations pepper the album, like the lifting of Gangsta Boo’s verse from “Playa Hataz” into album highlight “Southern Hospitality,” or the looped chant of “North Memphis” on “Eye for a Eye,” both techniques pioneered during their cassette-tape heyday. The Memphis sound was always timeless, as transfixing as it was body-moving, and Dem Goats makes a great case for finding freedom in a formula.
