Inspectah Deck, on "Sound the Horns", comes with easily one of the top five C. On "Ill Figures", Kool G Rap does twisted-up, lispy, half-off-beat gun-talk so well that you'd probably guess he'd been doing it for decades even if you didn't know.
Most of these songs don't have actual choruses, so gnarled shit-talk is the focus here, and the assembled old gods still do it well. And because the Revelations play music even during the interludes, those bits never fuck up the flow of the album.Īnd it certainly helps that most of the craggy veterans here, Wu and otherwise, go in hard on this thing.
Fizzy co-produced every actual song on the album, and these tracks have a hard-hitting simplicity that probably serves a quickie all-posse album like this one better than RZA's choked paranoia would. And so credit might be due to Fizzy Womack, otherwise known as M.O.P.'s Lil Fame, probably the best beatmaker currently working the underground NYC circuit. There's an organic old-soul crackle to the incendiary trumpet-bursts on "Sound the Horns" or the slow-rolling bassline on "Ill Figures", but that warmth is the sort of warmth that the better East Coast producers can get out of old records. The music comes from the Brooklyn soul band the Revelations, who do live-band rap music as well as just about anyone, which is to say that you can't tell you're hearing a live band most of the time. Because once you get past the brevity and the non-Wuness of it all, there is some beautifully executed hardhead grown-folks rap shit on here. A decade on, it's oddly comforting that a label would aim for your Wu-Tang consumer dollar even when that dollar barely exists anymore.īut if Wu-Tang Chamber Music is a hackneyed cash-grab, it's a pretty good hackneyed cash grab. The mere existence of this LP has a weird late-90s quality to it it's a throwback to the time when record-store shelves were crammed with with albums by vaguely Wu-affiliated crews like Killarmy and Sunz of Man, when labels would rush out any old crap they could slap that W logo on.
And make no mistake: People who read The Wu-Tang Manual are definitely the target audience here.