There’s always two pieces that need to fit together well when a producer and emcee get together. I know this isn’t groundbreaking news to most hip hop fans, but sometimes it needs to be said. If a really talented emcee can’t find a producer to give them just the right amount of challenge and comfort, they’ll be doomed to wallow in obscurity. On the flip side, if a really talented producer works with a mediocre to poor emcee, the most progressive and challenging music can seem more mundane than it is. Unfortunately, that’s what happened with The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen.

The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen is the collaboration between Danish producer Simon Muschinsky and West Coast emcee NOTE. Listening to their debut EP, I can’t help but think that Muschinsky is wasting his considerable talents on NOTE. He’s bringing in all sorts of interesting production techniques and styles, mixing in a myriad of European electronic music styles into a hip hop context. It’s fresh and exciting and bursting with energy. Unfortunately, NOTE does not rise to the challenge. Instead, we get lazy rhymes that more or less sound like a gangsta rapper cliché checklist. Bitches? Hos? Guns? Snitches? They’re all there, with out the least bit of substance or context to complicate things, just really dragging down the entire EP. What should come across as a short, eexciting teaser of an EP is instead transformed into a five song collection that manages to really drag on, and I’m more than ready for it to finish by the time the last song comes on.

Sometimes you take the emcee/producer dynamic for granted, but then you come across something like The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen, and you realize how one weak link can ruin the whole project. I feel weird singling out one person in a two person group, but NOTE is really wasting Muschinsky’s time and energy here. Hopefully he can find another emcee to work with in the future that will elevate his music, instead of working against it.