Are chart-toppers Bliss N Eso a party band with an identity crisis? SHAUN PRESCOTT reports on their latest album 'Running On Air'.

What’s so appealing about two North Shore rappers? There’s no rags-to-riches tale, and you can’t even beat one up. Local rap sells well in Australia, so they’re not blazing trails. They don’t have a sustained message, and when they’re having a tantrum it’s hard to take them seriously. The simple answer is that Bliss N Eso are good at writing party songs, the type that has the potential to squeeze munted, shirtless bravado out of the meekest among us. And if that isn’t success (because objectively they are a success, managing recently to prise Eminem from his six-week stint at the top of the ARIA charts) then what is?

There are plenty of answers to that question, just as there are many sides to Bliss N Eso. When they’re powering through hi-tempo bangers with ne’er too subliminal self-affirmative messages or calls to drop everything and revel, they’re incredible. Witness ‘Down By The River’, a charmingly pointless celebration of pissing it up by the water (and this being Sydney, party pooping cops should be wary of their AK47 and pack of angry ridgebacks). The Xzibit aided ‘People Up On It’ veritably robs from Snoop Dogg’s ‘Drop It Like It’s Hot’ while riding a cinematic Wu-Tang beat sans the crackle and lapse. This song executes one of those reliable hip-hop tropes – the post-success fuck you - where the artist puts paid to past enemies and current detractors. Bliss N Eso get away with a lot of their posturing because they’re usually funny, charismatic, impressively mellifluous, and when they get tough, again, it’s funny.

There are jokes that aren’t funny though, and moods that don’t work. They frequently harp on about their life experience with an air of guru-like wisdom, the lack of detail insinuating that their status as successful rappers means it comes with the territory. Likewise, the self-affirmative “you-can-do-anything-if-you-put-your-mind-to-it” reflex that pervades a lot of these songs has definitely worn thin by the end of this 19-track record. Bliss N Eso’s whole identity is homage: common lyrical reflexes emerge when there’s nothing else to say, lifted from the Big Book of Important Hip-hop Themes. RZA guests on this album, but it’s Eso who warns that he’s “got a liquid sword and he’ll park it in your face”.

“Bliss N Eso are good at writing party songs, the type that has the potential to squeeze munted, shirtless bravado out of the meekest among us.”

Bliss N Eso make saying little of consequence sound very profound indeed: we’re regaled with vague self-indictment one moment (‘Reflection’), and chastised for our own self-pity the next (‘Weightless Wings’). The production – helmed predominantly by Hattori Hunzo, though frequently by M-Phases and Matic - is sonically impressive but never dares to stray from a meat-and-potatoes hip-hop backing track that mirrors the broad-stroke lyrical content to a tee. There’s nothing subliminal or interpretive here.

But there’s plenty of grey area between their outright bangers and their moments of solemnity. ‘Coastal Kids’ illustrates a simple suburban upbringing with charm and clarity. Elsewhere, ‘Children of the Night’ warps a monotonous suburban panorama into something abstracted and surreal. You see it from above, all grids and speckles of light. It’s songs like this that makes it hard to diagnose Bliss N Eso as a party band with an identity crisis. Perhaps they’re a party band with the imperative to sell records with some semblance of street authority. They should abandon that affectation immediately.

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Running On Air is out now through Illusive.