Three years ago, Twin Cities emcee Musab paired up with Las Vegas producer Ink Well to form a group called Mink, dropping their debut album as a duo, Intellectual Property. Now they have come back to establish that the first album wasn’t just a one off project, firmly establishing themselves as a duo with Deconstruction.

Going into this project, Musab is describing the project as more of an audio seminar than an album, “more of a conference than a concert that exposes some of the harmful constructs within our society.” This statement sets up the great conflict of the album. One the one hand, I love when artists use their art to talk about important social and political issues, but on the other hand, there’s a fine line to walk between discussing this subject matter as food for thought and coming across too preachy, condescending, or just corny. Over the course of Deconstruction, Musab is able to mostly stay on the side of dope hip hop, but he does stumble off of the tightrope on multiple occasions as he works his way through the fourteen tracks on the album. There are great songs like “Medicated” with Mac Drakula and Tajai Massey that do a great job of putting into perspective the different ways in which our society medicates itself and how broken the system is that should have our best interests in mind. On the flip side, there are a few songs such as “Occultivation” that don’t work nearly as well. On this particular song, Musab just jumps right into attacking some random cults without any setup, and it feels like he’s jumping around and losing focus the whole song, never making a clear argument or explaining how someone might get swept up in a cult in the first place. On the production side of things, Ink Well is incredibly solid, delivering some enjoyable head nodding underground boom bap. He never steals the spotlight, preferring to work in a subtle manner that allows Musab to shine on the mic.

Deconstruction works more often than it falters, but it does feel just a little messy and unfinished. It’s tough to make an album that sounds like a seminar that still works as a dope hip hop album, and while Mink’s efforts where pretty good, there are times where it just gets too preachy for its own good.