Fucking incredible!
Black Sunday turned Cypress Hill into a Premier Division hip-hop act although the band are now quick to criticise the album they saw as being written and recorded too quickly under record company pressure. Unfair - it was a fine album, if not the ground breaker the warped funk of the self-titled debut was.
But this....this is jaw-dropping - a *huge* leap forward. Anyone who can write this off as being "more of the same" patently got the wrong CD in the sleeve! DJ Muggs has obviously been taking in the dark, creeping, bass-led paranoia of the east coast scene led by DJ Premier and the Wu-Tang clique. But also, more surprisingly, he seems to have been paying attention to the Mo'Wax label's dope-laden instrumental jazz/hip- hop grooves. Combine the two with the on-form, wired-to-explode nasal whine and jitter of B-Real and watch things get scary.
From the low-key throb of opener "Spark Another Owl" to the tingling piano and ghostly orchestral wails of "Stoned Raiders", B-Real stalks the soundscape. More sneering than ever, syllables clipped till the words are spat out like maching-gun bullets, Sen-Dog is reduced to little more than a ghostly presence for most of the album. But it doesn't matter. Cypress Hill have found a new level of scariness (only "Cock the Hammer" comes remotely close to the atmosphere here) and produced possibly raps first real 'headphones' album, with an immaculate, *spacey* production with a 101 things going on deep in the mix that takes listen upon listen to unravel.
An obvious stand-out is the collaboration with the Wu-Tang Clan's Rza, "Killa Hill Niggas", in which B-Real's squealing judder (this is *NOT* the cuddly cartoon gangsta of "Insane in the Brain") meets the Rza's calmly malevolent flow squeezed between gruff psycho-Latino threats.
But it's just the tip of the iceberg. Check out the Eastern flavoured "Illusions" where sitar meets xylophone behind a first-person detailing of a downward spiral more real than anything Trent Reznor could dream up. No money, dead girlfriend, family have turned their back on their 'hoodlum' son : "I'm trying to find ways to cope/But I ain't fucking around with the gauge or a rope" and "I'm having illusions/All this confusions fucking me up in my mind" sung in a chilling sing-song tone.
There's the *huge* Ice Cube diss of "No Rest for the Wicked" which takes all his rhymes and poses, spits on them and throws them back in his face, the argument being that Muggs has never been paid for his production work for Cube a few years back, and worse, has been biting their stuff behind their back; listen to his "Friday" track back to back with the first single from Temples of Boom, "Throw Your Set in the Air" for evidence. If I was Cube, I'd be scared.
And so it goes on, almost every track a highlight. The chillingly laid-back elevator-jazz-with-breakbeat that is "Boom Biddy Bye Bye". The moment that Samuel L. Jackson's biblical Pulp Fiction rant ends in gun- fire and the *hugest* beat kicks in behind *that* voice again on "Make a Move". The creeping piano and looped string section of "Killafornia". The Woah! of "Locotes", with the story built around some cinematic sound- effects pieces. The hammer-horror drone of "Let It Rain".
Cypress Hill - Yes good ol' Lollapalooza-alternative-rock-friendly Cypress Hill - have just gone and turned in probably the best and scariest (no mean feat considering the stuff that's oozing out of the east coast just now) hip-hop album of 1995. It's the biggest fuck-you to the mainstream since Nirvana's In Utero, and wipes out the majority of the underground and overground hangers-on in one fell swoop. Phenomenal.
