Album Reviews: Pandemic Era Rap Elixirs Curated

"Ghost Hammurabi" is a new track from Killah Priest, it also feels like the latest installment of the style heard throughout Priest's 2020 project Rocket to Nebula, with a drum-less beat and mesmerizing, evolving tempos overridden by rapid-fire lyricism evoking epic, cosmic scales. It's a track that might take some getting used to, or it might speak to you instantly. For me it was the latter. So it seems like a good way to start off this assemblage of reflections on my favorite rap albums from the past year. 

These are short reviews of some favorite albums from this pandemic era, last year and into 2021. Not exactly trying to provide objective criticism or a ranking of best albums, just giving my opinion on the albums that brought me excitement, enjoyment, or inspiration during the pandemic year. Not listed in any particular order, this is a curated list of rap elixirs I've been soaking in with thoughts on the merits of each. 

New article: "The Interstellar Corridors of Killah Priest's Rocket to Nebula"

My new album review was just published at Hip Hop Golden Age, the piece is called "The Interstellar Corridors of Killah Priest's Rocket to Nebula." Check it out HERE.

The Interstellar Corridors of Killah Priest's Rocket to Nebula

"Welcome to the Nebula, where the impossible is regular"

Killah Priest has been among my favorite artists for over 20 years now and, as I talk about at length in the review, he deserves accolades for continuing to grow and improve as an artist. Priest is most well known for his classic features on Wu-Tang Clan tracks, his affiliated Killa Beez group Sunz of Man, and his solo debut album from 1998, Heavy Mental. But, as I've written about on this blog before, Priest advanced his visual rhyming style and deepened his already encyclopedic content on albums like The Psychic World of Walter Reed (2013) and Planet of the Gods (2015) and has been dropping tons of new material the past several years. His second new album that dropped in 2020 is Rocket to Nebula, an hour-long spoken-word poetry cosmic trip, unlike any other rap album you'll hear. It's a cosmic journey to the farthest reaches of inner space, from the mind of a brilliant emcee who dwells often on metaphysics and mysticism. 

While Rocket to Nebula is loaded with esoteric subjects, celestial imagery, and occult magic and mysticism, it also continually returns to everyday reality of human life on earth. The poetic descriptions of some of the simple pleasures in life hit the listener differently during a time of pandemic and quarantine. And the cosmic journeys to imaginative utopias described in visual lyricism are stimulating for the mind. As I mention in the article, "Priest has occupied the role of shaman of the Wu tribe for many years now, but it’s good and well-timed to hear him fully embrace it for a full album." 

Here is the track "Digital Ghost" from Rocket to Nebula:

And here is a new track from Priest from an upcoming album, I'm really digging this one, it's called "Manuka Honey":

Looking Back on 2019 (Part 3)

Street art seen in Mexico City, June 2019.

A little delayed in sharing this final look back at some of the things I liked about 2019, but that gave me time to properly soak in the music that dropped later in the year. As always with this blog, my favorite new albums came out of the realm of hip hop in its purest and grimiest form.

We are now nearly a quarter century past the golden era of hip hop and the art form remains alive with a slew of newer artists arising to bring fresh blood and new approaches to a musical tradition whose forefathers they seem to not only respect but spiritually summon and pay homage to. Some established rap gods have also helped bring along the new artists. These phenomena were reflected in some of the albums and artists I dug in 2019. Here are, in no particular order, my favorite albums from last year with a few words about each.

The Hauntology of The Gold Room by Sadhugold

From the wikipedia page for Hauntology:

A derivation of Derrida's hauntology idea informs a style of 21st-century music exploring ideas related to temporal disjunction, retrofuturism, cultural memory, and the persistence of the past. Hauntology often involves the sampling of older, "spectral" sound sources to evoke deeper cultural memory. Common reference points in hauntological music include vintage analog synthesisers and cassette tapes, library music, old science-fiction and pulp horror programmes (including the soundtracks of the BBC Radiophonic Workshop), musique concrète and found sounds, dub and English psychedelia, and 1970s public informational films. A common element is the foregrounding of the recording surface noise, including the crackle and hiss of vinyl and tape, calling attention to the decaying medium itself.

According to Nature Sounds, the new instrumental album The Gold Room by Sadhugold was "conceived as the score of a prequel to Stanley Kubrick’s classic film The Shining" but it also feels like a perfect embodiment of hauntological music. An instrumental homage to a classic ghost story film that creates a spectral vibe of its own thru dusty, lo-fi analog elements and distorted, mutating melodies that feel like they're emanating out of a haunted jukebox. Or the analog dispatch radio in the office of The Overlook with the call letters KDK12.

I've been very impressed with this album, captivated by Sadhugold's chunky kicks-and-snares and the way he toys with and distorts each beat. Also interesting to me is how this is a straight instrumental record, no vocals at all, not even any kind of clips of voices from The Shining. Through the track titles and the movements of the song, though, Sadhu creates audio spectral visions of the themes of the film. One of the best examples is on "Dull Boy" where the melody, an absolute banger of resonant organ keys, gives the sense of a spiraling descent into madness and chaos, confirmed by the track title referring to that iconic scene of The Shining where Jack Torrance's wife discovers every page he's written says "All work and no play makes Jack a dull boy."

Kubrick's 1980 film is one of the greatest cinematic puzzles ever devised, a labyrinth with a life of its own, springing forth elaborate subjective interpretations, theories, and homages from creative souls who become allured into its layers. I've gone thru my own phases of obsessing over Kubrick and The Shining and written about it in this space. That film seems inexhaustible, a classic in every respect, and while it has inspired a whole subculture of devotees (including previous attempts at hauntological musical renditions) this new project from Sadhugold was an ambitious idea that he executed with a mastery worthy of the filmmaker he's paying tribute to. The whole album is a banger that can stay on repeat, revealing new ripples and distorted spectral disturbances with each listen.




(Thank you to my friend Angelo for putting me on to that concept of Hauntology, a word combining haunting and ontology.)

Album Review: Ghost Files: Bronze Tape

Ghost Files: Bronze Tape (Remixes) - Ghostface Killah & Bronze Nazareth
(released Nov. 30, 2018).

It finally happened: in the year that marked Wu-Tang Clan's 25th anniversary, we were finally blessed with an album from one of the nine generals fully produced by their most talented Wu-Element, Detroit's "hip hop blues" wizard Bronze Nazareth. After a productive decade-and-a-half waiting in the wings of the W---producing or featuring on tracks with virtually the entire Clan* and producing albums for Wu Killa Beez like Dom Pachino (of Killarmy), 60 Second Assassin (Sunz of Man) and Timbo King (Royal Fam)---in 2018, Bronze Nazareth got to design the soundscape for an official Ghostface album. Tony Starks, whose penchant for soul sounds is right in Bronze's wheelhouse. Indeed Bronze, given a chance to take a Ghost album for a spin, roars out the gate in a hail of fire, jetting along curves like a Bugatti, carting a dump truck full of jukeboxes jangling soul sounds over a rocky road of chunky bass and snares. That's the sound of Ghost Files: Bronze Tape. Keeping with the motorcar metaphor, the journey is punctuated by a few brief stoplights featuring dramatic dialogues from dusty old films while soul jams loop quietly in the background. With such heavy presence by the producer deploying cinematic clips and heavily orchestrated bangers, manipulating beats to embellish bars, the overall audio experience conjures classic Wu in a fresh form.

The project began in October with The Lost Tapes, a new album from Ghostface stuffed with notable features and fully produced by talented beatmaker and imposturous internet author, Big Ghost Ltd. Eight weeks later, fans were gifted a special double-edition of remixes to that album, the Bronze Tape (prod. by Bronze) and the Propane Tape (prod. by Agallah). While the Agallah version and the original Big Ghost Ltd version are both solid, in what amounted to a three-sided producer battle to craft the best Ghostface album, the kid from Motown put on a clinic. In this review I want to focus on how the Bronze Tape embodies what sets Bronze apart as a producer and why this record offers promise to diehard Wu-Tang fans hungry for fresh production.

Album Review: Orpheus vs. the Sirens by The Hermit and the Recluse (Ka & Animoss)

Orpheus in Hades  (Beronneau, 1897).

"Judging from my cover, each chapter's a revelation" 

- Ka

An emcee who delivers even one artfully arrowed dart or whole song weaved of references from Greek mythology would be worthy of praise. What Brownsville rapper Ka did on my favorite album of 2018, Orpheus vs. the Sirens (a collaboration with producer Animoss under the group name Hermit and the Recluse), deserves accolades of the utmost extreme. This ten-track album must be the closest thing Hip Hop has come to James Joyce's epic novel Ulysses. Whereas Joyce structured the 18 episodes of his modern text Ulysses around the wanderings of Odysseus, the 10 songs of Orpheus vs. the Sirens follow the adventures of Orpheus accompanying the Argonauts on their quest for the Golden Fleece. Notice how the style of the title on the cover of Orpheus vs. the Sirens even resonates with the cover of the American edition of Ulysses, as seen below:

Album Reviews: The Wu-Tang Phoenix Re-Arises Again

The sheen on the iron "W" was scuffed following Wu-Tang Clan's disappointing 2014 album A Better Tomorrow and the whole distasteful debacle of the Once Upon a Time in Shaolin project. Maybe any press is good press, but while Wu-Tang remains generally beloved and un-fucked-with, the PR hit resulting from the one-two punch of teasing fans with a new Wu-Tang Forever-sounding album assembled by one of the team's freshest new beat-makers sold as one single secret copy to one of the most hated men in the world while instead serving to the public a fractured and subpar group project produced by a rusty and out-of-touch RZA, definitively marked a low point in the Wu-Tang legacy. Maybe the lowest point.

Not to be kept down for long, the Wu phoenix has re-arisen again. The whole Wu-Tang conglomerate has regrouped and brought forth a swarm in 2017, releasing a slew of new projects that serve to reassert their present skills and still-fearsome roster depth while burnishing the legacy of the brand. No bullshit, no gimmicks, just dope beats and dope rhymes. (To top it off, the asshole who acquired the single copy album, Martin Shkreli, was sentenced to prison in a case where a prospective juror stated on the record that he held a grudge against Shkreli because "he disrespected the Wu-Tang Clan.")

Here are some capsule reviews of the new projects brought forth in 2017 thus far.

Street Lamps: Hip Hop in the Dark Ages

Mural by Retna.

The Trumpacolyptic Revelations of Amerikkka

Since the Trumpocalypse began, most of the world has been mired in despair, confusion, and uncertainty. The highest office in the land, the most powerful position atop the most powerful country in the world, has been handed over to a capricious billionaire whose most ardent supporters include the Ku Klux Klan and neo-Nazis. To make matters worse, he quickly loaded up his cabinet with all manner of ghoulish racists, white nationalists, and billionaire bankers. The last few months have felt like the scene in Ghostbusters where the prick from the city inspector's office pries open the containment unit opening the floodgates for an overwhelming stream of ghosts and demons. Somehow this is reality.

During this period of darkness, I've found there are very few indulgences that make sense within this context, few things that really feel right. Thomas Pynchon makes sense. So I read Vineland, the paranoid novel inspired by the fearful proto-fascism of Nixon and Reagan. Philip K. Dick makes sense. So I've checked out the new series The Man In the High Castle based on his novel, a bizarre scenario envisioning America if the Nazis and Japan had won World War II.

And, above all: Hip Hop makes sense. Hip Hop feels right during these times.

Not unlike the oddly reassuring Dave Chapelle appearance on SNL immediately after the election, where the message was basically that this latest travesty of hatred and racism is nothing new, I've found myself retreating into Hip Hop (real Hip Hop, not the fake shit) where the message has always been that the system is corrupt, racist, deceitful, and predatory. From the early days of Public Enemy, KRS-One, and Ice Cube on through Wu-Tang, Immortal Technique, Dead Prez, and Mos Def, the message has remained the same. Things didn't change with Obama in office. The drug war persists, the prison industrial complex grows, police brutality worsens, poverty lingers, and black disenfranchisement continues.

Back in 2011, as demonstrations were erupting around the world leading to what became the Arab Spring and Occupy Wall Street, I wrote a review of the debut album from the late Kevlaar 7, Who Got the Camera?, a scathing sociopolitical wake-up call. I opened by quoting Ezra Pound who said "The artist is the antenna of the race, the barometer and voltmeter" and Marshall McLuhan who saw art "at its most significant, as a DEW line, a Distant Early Warning system that can always be relied on to tell the old culture what is beginning to happen to it.” In Trumpocalyptic America, many are wondering who could've seen this coming, how could we have let this happen, how can America (or Amerikkka) really be this racist. Well, the answer is that true artists, in America's case, Hip Hop artists who have their antennas up, have been warning us of this for many years.

Album Review(s): THE YEAR OF BRONZE

"Still standing, unweathered Bronze monolith"

- Lord Jessiah

Here in Austin, Texas the SXSW festival kicks off this weekend. It was almost exactly a year ago that I got to meet up with my old friend M-Eighty in the heart of the SXSW madness to hang out (along with Tash from the Alkaholiks providing comic relief) in order to receive an exclusive listening session of the then-soon-to-be-released album from Canibus & Bronze Nazareth, Time Flys, Life Dies...Phoenix Rise (written about here last year).

That album would end up being the opening salvo in an impressive series of Bronze-produced full-length releases that dropped in the ensuing months. Further solidifying his status as a 21st century successor to RZA, Bronze the heavy instrumentalist out of Detroit crafted four different LPs in 2015, each with its own consistent, cohesive sound, essence and theme while even placing the spotlight on individual members of his group to the give them some shine. Aside from the Canibus LP and a collaboration with Killarmy legend Dom Pachino, in 2015 Bronze produced each of the debut solo albums for members of his Wisemen crew Illah Dayz and Salute.

That's four albums in a twelve month span (five if you count Bronze's solo project from November 2014, Thought for Food Volume 3). It was truly The Year of Bronze.

This prolific output also occurred in the aftermath of Bronze losing his brother and close collaborator Kevlaar 7 who departed the physical due to complications from a blood disorder in December 2014. Listening to the albums that make up The Year of Bronze, one continually gets a sense that it was all a dedication to Kevlaar. (#DoingItForKev) Many of The Year's best songs are ones Bronze spent ample time mixing and mastering his brother's verses and microphone presence on. Posthumously released Kevlaar verses and beats (every single one of them dope) played an important part in The Year of Bronze, as we will see.

Even after releasing four albums of undeniably towering quality throughout the year, Bronze continued to get a raw deal from the hip hop press. Aside from some discussion of the Canibus project (and reviews by the prolific writer Sunez Allah), the hip hop media as a whole mostly ignored The Year of Bronze. In contrast, Bronze's colleague Cilvaringz received consistent press throughout the year for the gimmick of producing a Wu-Tang album that the world will likely never hear. The Cilvaringz vs. Bronze Nazareth debate for best producer is a close one, but while Cilvaringz in his career has made one album, a few features, and an overhyped record that will likely never escape the clutches of our world's Lex Luthor, Bronze served the people four full-length albums in 2015 alone.

The super producer with the overflowing resumé is also a fierce lyricist whose abstract angled bars consistently reveal the architect brain behind the beats he's built a reputation for. While The Year of Bronze was a showcase of the latest efforts from hip hop's premier beat maker, throughout the albums he orchestrated, Bronze also got to step into the booth and shred it up with his rhymes a few times.

What follows is a walkthrough of The Year of Bronze, highlighting its best moments while especially taking note of the role played by the late Kevlaar 7 throughout.

Album Review: A sneak peek at the new Canibus & Bronze Nazareth record Time Flys, Life Dies...Phoenix Rise

This year's local SXSW festival was a mostly low-key one for me but I did have one eventful and exciting evening. It began with an "experiential marketing" promo for one of my favorite films from last year, Interstellar, wherein participants donned headphones and an Oculus Rift virtual reality headset to transport to a spaceship making its way toward a wormhole. It was my first encounter of Oculus Rift, something I've often heard about recently but never thought I'd actually get to try out.

It was about as amazing as I could have expected, especially when the Interstellar spaceship shifted into zero gravity mode. Somehow the immersion in Oculus Rift's virtual reality actually made it feel like I was floating, while I could see the ringed planet Saturn, in all its glory, just outside the ship's window.

Shortly thereafter, sitting in a truck parked near the Interstellar promo tent, I had the privilege of partaking in a full listening session for the upcoming album by Canibus & Bronze Nazareth Time Flys, Life Dies...Phoenix Rise. The conjunction of these two experiences seems oddly fitting. The gravelly voiced lyrical scientist known as Canibus has been providing high-tech rhymes for nearly two decades now. A virtual reality experience putting you on board a spaceship traveling toward a wormhole is exactly the type of thing Canibus tends to rap about. It's also not out of the realm of possibility that the dictionary-scouring wordsmith already coined the term "Oculus Rift" on some long-winded track from a dozen years ago.

The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly: A Review of Wu-Tang Clan's A Better Tomorrow

After two years of contentious attempts at coming together as one, the Wu-Tang Clan finally completed and released their 20th anniversary album, A Better Tomorrow, last December.

As part of a series commemorating this album's release, I ranked the albums in their catalogue, examined the original (and better) "A Better Tomorrow" and even attempted to compare each member to an NBA player from the '90s. Now, finally, we take a look at A Better Tomorrow, a mostly disappointing album that still gave us plenty to talk about. I'm a little late in reviewing it (most reviews came in shortly after the album's early December release) but the extra time has at least allowed me to soak things in a little more while tempering my initial reactions.

Since it's a special occasion and there's so much to talk about with regards to this album, I decided to experiment with breaking the review down according to The Good, the Bad & the Ugly (with respects to Sergio Leone). Enjoy.

The Music I Did and Didn't Hear in 2014

Trying to finish up this little series of year-end posts before we get too far into 2015...

Looking over the music I listened to in 2014, it's clear that I didn't do a very good job keeping up with the latest releases of even just my preferred narrow subgenre of underground hip hop. Thus, reviewing the albums of 2014 for me is as much about what I did listen to as what I didn't and still need to seek out.

Firstly, I already wrote a more in-depth piece about the two albums that were my favorites from the first half of 2014, The Living Daylights and Life Outside the Frame, so be sure to go give that a read.

Musically it was a great year as most of my favorite artists released long-awaited new material, including Bronze Nazareth, Madlib, Cormega, and the Wu-Tang Clan. In fact, looking back on it I spent most of the year listening almost exclusively to these new projects (while dabbling in their past catalogues plus exploring the old blind sage composer Moondog).

Rock Konducta (Parts 1 & 2) by Madlib
Was pining for this for a while. The vinyl dropped last January but those of us without phonographs had to wait until July for the mp3/CD version. Madlib, the legendary producer/sonic-trip-extraordinaire, added onto his mammoth catalogue with this newest edition of the "Beat Konducta" instrumental series, featuring a potpourri of obscure samples from the farthest reaches of 60s-70s psychedelic rock, prog rock, Zamrock, Krautrock, and every other eclectic rock, twisted, tweaked and chopped up into hip hop beats. Totaling more than 80 minutes over 50 tracks, most of them less than 2 minutes long, Rock Konducta is an enclosed universe in and of itself. There's an endless array of miscellaneous snippets, cacophonous blurts of speech, screams, Bill Murray disc jockey riffs, jangling-metal hi-hats, crunching drum lines, badass loops, synth-heavy snoozers, odd offputting tirades, the most random yelps you've ever heard (this tape has a recurrent motif featuring what sounds like a mentally disabled woman bleating "Gimme a dollar!"), ringing alarm clocks or phones, stand-up routines, and every other sonic microcomponent Madlib could cobble together to line this collage of treasures from his rock vinyl collection. There's certainly plenty of skippable material here, but you can easily distill this vast assemblage into a playlist of 30 tracks that are excellent (which is exactly what I did). Or you can listen to the full thing and drift away into the far reaches of Madlib's weird mind.

Favorite tracks: First of all, where the hell does he come up with all these track names? There are 52 tracks in all, none of which have a generic name. Among my favorites are the thumping, mildly melancholy "Motorik Matching", the rugged pysch rock jam "Black Widow", the woodwind orchestral head-bopper "Giant Okra", and the drum-heavy up-tempo controlled chaos known as "Soap Guillotine" on Part 1; deep into the more lackluster Part 2 is my favorite loop on the whole project "Dies Irae" (it's become one of my favorite Madlib beats ever), the rest of Part 2 is unspectacular aside from the rugged fiddle symphony "Teapot", the penultimate percussion showcase "Soon Over" and, of course, the beat tape's closing 30 seconds into which Madlib enigmatically inserts one of the finest, most grave-sounding beats. You'll first need to sit through a 90-second satirical skit of a botched plane hijacking because it's only after that, and a transitional distorted sample singing "though I call from far awayyyy/ you don't listen...," when the Beat Konducta decides to flip on the serious switch.

Ranking the Albums of the Wu-Tang Clan

The Wu-Tang Clan will form like Voltron once again. The Staten Island supergroup, widely considered to be the greatest rap group of all time, is set to release their 6th studio album, A Better Tomorrow, next week in commemoration of their 20th anniversary. Generating a massive amount of media buzz for a bunch of 40-something rappers (many of whose contemporaries have faded away by now), they are also going to be auctioning off a single-copy "secret" album, Once Upon a Time in Shaolin, which has already garnered multimillion-dollar offers and may never be heard by the general public.

As the 9 lyrical swordsmen are primed to release their first official group album in seven years, here is how I rank the five albums in their catalogue.

Album Reviews: Life Outside the Frame & The Living Daylights

When it comes to art, no matter the medium, what I tend to find most intriguing is the artist's style, their unique fingerprint. Creativity consists of focusing the luminescent energies of imagination through one's personal prism, bending that light into original forms and angles according to the curves of one's distinctive artistic style. In this way, the best artists tend to strike us with a distinguishable spectral pattern, within the defined framework of their medium of course.

Two recent hip hop albums have been in heavy rotation for me during the first half of the year, both featuring lyricists with strikingly unique styles. Ironically, the two artists are also nearly opposite from each other in their approaches. While the albums share some basic similarities---both being of the underground hardcore rap variety and both collaborative works between one emcee and one producer---one lyricist twirls out heavily-worded abstract bars with rapidity while the other utilizes conciseness, internal rhymes, pauses, and other crafty techniques. One album is loaded with no fewer than 17 multiple-verse tracks; the other is practically EP-length, a quick 35 minutes. Both are compelling in their own way.

Paranom & Purpose - Life Outside the Frame
On his debut album, Paranom shines with a sharp voice and mesmerizing flow. His verses are constant streams of elaborate wordplay and surrealist imagery strung together over the polished, crisp yet somehow rugged production of Purpose. This collaborative project is the latest release from the Massachusetts-based Tragic Allies crew (who I've written about before). These guys are purists, dedicated to the golden era format of hip hop as artwork and they've mastered the craft.

The fluid, precise delivery of dexterous rhymes is a noted specialty of the Tragic Allies contingent (such skills are all over last year's Golden Era Musical Sciences album) and newest member Paranom certainly excels at this, but what's most impressive is the vocabulary and surreal imagery in his unique lyrical arsenal. His raps reward repeated listens; honing in on the swiftly delivered lyrics reveals a rich array of obscure terms like "tetramorph" and "vesica piscis" weaved effortlessly in his writing. The verbal imagery is taken to truly hallucinatory heights in the somnolent track-length trips of "Bee Stings (Seraphémme)" which opens with envisioning "Rose petals pouring liquid steel" and my favorite track "Dreamz" where the second verse begins:

"Gettin' faded to explore the universe inside me
dreams confronted with the world crumblin' behind me
underwater with the sharks gnawin' on them bodies
with they teeth fall in speech codes and Hammurabi"

The lyricism alone stands out on Life Outside the Frame but what makes this album so replayable is the full-length production from Purpose. His moody tones and heavy bassliness, occasionally enhanced with DJ scratches, create a cohesive sonic experience. The ostensible leader of the Tragic Allies crew, Purpose is proficient at making others sound good with his lively boom-bap loops. The poet Paranom's endless repertoire of original linguistics thus finds a perfect instrumental canvas to stretch out on and the combo yields potential classics like the mellifluous "Microphone Phenomenal" and the genuinely reflective "Dayz Go By".


Paranom stands out as an artist of limitless potential and talent, if perhaps only underground appeal because of the abstract language of his lyrics. Even if you didn't understand a single word of his verses though, his voice, flow and delivery simply sounds good over beats. Comprehending his words reveals an introspective, poetic intellectual artist who has created an album full of tough, rugged, raw hip hop while hardly uttering a curseword in his verses.

This is the best drop from the Tragic Allies camp thus far, already a personal classic, and Paranom already has a lot to live up to after such an impressive introduction.


Willie the Kid & Bronze Nazareth - The Living Daylights

While I had been aware of Willie the Kid for many years based on his name often popping up alongside his Wu-Tang-affiliated brother La the Darkman, I honestly was never compelled to seek out his work simply because of his generic name. Rappers with the appellation "The Kid" or "Young" or "Lil" are a dime a dozen and often the same can be said about their lyrics. A full collaboration with his fellow Grand Rapids, MI native and certified human factory of dope music, Bronze Nazareth, finally brought his work to my full attention. It became immediately apparent that Willie the Kid is a refreshingly unique and highly entertaining artist.  There's a brief line on "The Blitz" that sums up this effect perfectly:

"My abnormal rapport, my normal nomenclature

rare form for the art form"

A noted minimalist with a catalog full of acclaimed EPs and yet no full albums to date, Willie keeps his portions short, rich, and elegant much like an expensive meal. Appearing on 11 of the 13 tracks on The Living Daylights, he is often limited to one verse and his rhymes even feature lots of short bars.

Conciseness is part of the grand design though, as Willie's writing craft is a sophisticated and intricate one. His clearly enunciated verses are full of finesse and flourish. A true connoisseur of words, he calls himself "a thinking man's rapper" and indeed the thinking man will be satiated not only by Willie's wordsmithery but also by the various subtle techniques he frequently employs in his rhyme structures like internal rhymes, pauses, and enjambments. The last part of his verse on "Avalon" is a good example of some of these tactics:

"I'm brave enough to be creative
but I acclimate like a native
trying to blend in with the cadence,
abide by the rules, fuck the latest
trend, I just came for the accolades
Spend
more time on important shit
self-improvement
it's money, assorted shit"

With his "normal nomenclature" comes the expectation that, like most generically-named rappers, he mostly raps (or brags) about wealth and material things. Indeed, Willie obviously has a taste for the finer things but with his respectable artistic pedigree he's kind of a paradox. He raps plenty about opulence, but he tends to keep it creative and original. An amusing example of this: his verses are littered with food. The listener mentally savors all kinds of exquisite cuisines, not to mention there are tracks called "Bless My Food" and "Breakfast in France". Reeling off the names of exotic locales is another favorite device: "The fly, I'm in Dubai hittin' sand dunes/ or in Japan on the bullet train, Cancun."

So impressed by Willie's output, I've yet to touch on Bronze's production (or the album's many guest appearances). Having now produced over a half-dozen front-to-back albums, the beat maestro Bronze Nazareth has gotten to be an expert at making a fully cohesive record and The Living Daylights is just the latest example. A true collaboration which bears the mark of Bronze all over it, there's a nice subtle Wu-Tang feel to the project. It even has a few well-placed kung-fu clips. The tracklist is punctuated by two earth-rattling bangers in "Fucking Blades" and the album's standout "Delirium" which, along with La the Darkman's vicious solo track "Ice Cold Guinness", will make any Wu head nod ecstatically. Beyond those formidable barrages, I've been enamored with the twisted up soul loops on "Coming From" and "Bless My Food".

For such a brief album it has plenty of guest appearances. These range from superb (Roc Marciano on "Avalon"; Sha Stimuli on "Delirium") to forgettable (Sun God on "Wu Babies"; Tekh Togo on "Bless My Food") and the latter is really the only unappealing factor about this project. Listening to the album over and over again, you're left with a hunger for more from Willie the Kid. And the sole rhyming appearance from Bronze on "Coming From" highlights a notably effective and potent contrast between the two lyricists that was evident on past Bronze/Willie collabs "Malcolm X Manuscripts" and "Farewell". Would've been nice to hear Bronze on the mic a little more in lieu of the uninitiated features. As it is though, the burgeoning star Willie the Kid can claim yet another entertaining and rich-in-replay-value record to his name.

Five New Hip Hop Albums Reviewed

Reviewing a handful of records from the first five months of 2013 that have occupied my ears...

The Psychic World of Walter Reed - Killah Priest

A 41-track encyclopedic masterwork from arguably the most gifted lyricist under the Wu-Tang umbrella, PWOWR is Priest's tenth album, a double-CD overflowing with a bewildering variety of mystical/cosmic/occult/street poetics. We get the full range of Priest's writing abilities in this massive collection: intricately weaved story tracks, intensely destructive battle raps, acapella spoken-word poetry psychic trips, certified Wu bangers, cinematic tours through dark electro-dystopian futures and uplifting journeys through the interstellar psycho-spiritual domain of the Wu tribe's articulate shaman.

New piece in Slant Mag on Masta Killa

"I wrote this degree/
adjust ya eyes to the light/ so you could see"
- Masta Killa

Had a little piece published yesterday in Slant Magazine, my fourth for their them so far, a review of Wu-Tang Clan dart-throwing extraordinaire Masta Killa's new solo album entitled Selling My Soul. An unusually slick and soulful (and very short) batch of tracks that serve largely as a promotional showcase of Masta Killa's dexterity of flow and subtly striking poetics, essentially a preview to his long-awaited full length album Loyalty is Royalty.

(Expanded reflections on the career of Masta Killa after the jump...)

Album Review: Sophisticated Movement by Kevlaar 7 & Woodenchainz

"My vinyl voice so vintage, hear the *crackling* and the *clicking*"
- Kevlaar 7

With three high-quality releases in less than two years, Kevlaar 7 is arguably the most consistent purveyor of pure hip hop right now. This latest offering, Sophisticated Movement, is a 15-track collaboration with burgeoning beatcrafter Woodenchainz, an album bursting at the seams with soulfulness as the sounds of decrepit Detroit's underground hip hop/blues heart continues to pour out from the Wisemen camp.

Album Review: Die Ageless by Kevlaar 7

"I must've been an emcee in my past life/

presently I'm unquestionably poetic/ I'm mad nice"

- Cormega

"the great ever living dead man"
- Coleridge describing Shakespeare

For a brief decade or so, as you may remember, CD singles were a thing. You'd go to the store and buy a compact disc that contained at most 2 or 3 songs, sometimes instrumental and acapella versions included. A good enough single with substance to it might make that lone compact disc worth innumerable hours of spinning. The hip hop genre's ultimate height, the 1990s, coincided with the plateau of compact discs. As more and more music was enabled to be stored and condensed into less and less space, the overall quality of the artform rapidly diminished to the point of catering toward 99-cent ringtone simplicity. In similar fashion, the medium of printed books began as a means of storing and increasing our knowledge only to eventually have bookstores fill up with vacuous bestsellers. 

In his first full-length offering, Die Ageless, Detroit emcee/producer Kevlaar 7 has assembled a vastly rich musical novel of 19 chapters (18 songs plus thoughtful intro). One could isolate any one or two tracks, carry them around like an old single compact disc and continually uncover an astoundingly intricate artistic nuance throughout. It's a collection of true hip hop singles, every track feels deeply considered, you really could split this album up into 3 short EPs that would all have replay value. 

On DOOM in Slant

"feel him in ya heart chakra, chart toppa

start shit stoppa, be a smart shoppa"

 - DOOM on "Figaro"

"the suggestion thrown out by the doomster in loquacity lunacy" 

- Finnegans Wake, p. 49

My review of the new JJ DOOM (Jneiro Jarel + MF DOOM) album Key to the Kuffs is now up at Slant Magazine. Go give it a read and let me know what you think. (Certainly not the best thing I've ever written, but it's part of my attempt to get back in the groove after some time off.)

Here's the funky new video for the album's first single "Guv'nor".


DOOM recently appeared on BBC Radio 1 and basically took over the show for two hours. The host played dozens of tracks from the Supevillain's vast catalogue and there's a good 40 minutes or so worth of exclusive interview with the elusive, reclusive metal-mask-wearing savant. You can stream the show in its entirety here or if that doesn't work, here's a download link.

Also, Jneiro Jarel put out an eclectic little mixtape for the album featuring remixes, some original old songs that were the influence behind his Key to the Kuffs beats, and more. Listen to it here and if you can find a download link for it, please send it to me.

For those interested, here is my thorough track-by-track review of the previous DOOM album Born Like This.

Album Review: School for the Blindman by Bronze Nazareth

Specs like Ray Charles seeing from his grave
He said "Bronze, you could hear the color of clouds
and see the sounds of existence like braille printed out"
- Bronze Nazareth

Maybe we could have predicted it, maybe we could've seen him coming. Just as the flourishing basketball culture of the early to mid-90s---with various flavors of expertise on display from Michael Jordan, Magic Johnson, Charles Barkley, Clyde Drexler, Larry Bird, etc---merged with the DNA of a growing young super athlete to eventually become the all-around hoops behemoth that is LeBron James, the apotheosis of hip hop in the 90s was experienced by a growing Motown youth of musical precocity to eventually bring forth Bronze Nazareth, Wu-Tang's #1 draft pick.