Nonce, Twice, Track Three Features Ladies

The Nonce: Mix Tapes, Good To Go, and On The Road Again
from the album World Ultimate on Wild West Records (1995).

For a long time the post-Common’s Resurrection, pre-Jurassic 5’s Quality Control period of the late 90s was a hip hop waste-land. While I still find that time frame to be a real dry spell in terms of amazing albums, I keep uncovering albums from that era to help redeem it. One of my more recent discoveries is the underground championed The Nonce.

This duo (the fantastically named Nouka Basetype and the late Yusef Afloat) from Los Angeles released two albums and an EP between 1995 and 1999, and their debut album World Ultimate is a consistently pleasing listening experience. Start to finish, it is all easy, lazy head nod in effect and the rappers trade off with comfortingly familiar flows that can tend to melt into the hazy background. “Mix Tapes” was released as a single, and it definitely can appeal to the heads with the tapes of making, trading, and getting tapes. The bassline and two note piano sample create a rather haunting vibe for such a nostalgic song, but I chill just listening to this.

A little more interesting in terms in of the production is my favorite track from the album “Good To Go.” The flutter that pans around stereo sets off the lovely boom bap and piano loop. Sounds like the production that inspired early Fat Jon to me. Beautiful stuff that you seldom hear with rappers anymore. And finally, the most commercial track off the album is “On The Road Again,” which is again a slice of life for a hip hop head. Here we get Figures of Speech providing the background vocals and a more uptempo track (or as uptempo as these mellow cats get). Overall The Nonce’s 1995 album full of their own nostalgia, has reached me more than a decade later and filled me with my memories of this type of music and the days when it was all around us.