Fresh from dropping a lot of good new music with Canibus, Bronze Nazareth has blessed LostPoet & Kincee with a remix to their track The Return. Its from the Golden Calf album, and you can check it out below.
Category: Wu-Tang Clan
Canibus & Bronze Nazareth – ‘Matte BLK Rapana’
The third single from the new Canibus & Bronze Nazareth album, Time Flys, Life Dies… Phoenix Rise, has arrived. You can listen to Matte BLK Rapana below, and pre-order the album from iTunes now.
Listen to previous drops Seismoluminescence and Bronze Horses.
Ghostface Killah – ‘Emergency Procedure’ feat. Pharoahe Monch
The Pharoahe Monch featuring Emergency Procedure is one of the standouts from recent Ghostface Killah album 36 Seasons (except for the damn repetitive hook from Ghost), and has now been given the same animated video treatment as previous single The Battlefield. Watch below, and let us know what you think.
Killah Priest – ‘The Color of Ideas’
Wu-Tang Clan affliate Killah Priest is gearing up for the release of new album Planet of the Gods with the release of new single The Color of Ideas. Subject matter is what you’d expect from KP, and you can watch the video for it below.
Canibus & Bronze Nazareth – ‘Bronze Horses’
Following on from recent track Seismoluminescence, Canibus and Bronze Nazareth have dropped new joint Bronze Horses, from new album Time Flys, Life Dies…Phoenix Rise, out soon. Listen below.
Czarface – ‘Every Hero Needs A Villain’ trailer
Czarface (7L & Esoteric, Inspectah Deck) are close to dropping new album Every Hero Needs A Villain, and have teased us with the trailer below. Boasting a feature list that includes MF Doom, Juju, Large Professor, and fellow Wu-Tang Clan legends Method Man and GZA, this is shaping up to be great.
Czarface (7L & Esoteric, Inspectah Deck) – ‘Deadly Class’ feat. Meyhem Lauren
Czarface (7L & Esoteric, Inspectah Deck) are back with upcoming new album Every Hero Needs a Villain, and here drop first single Deadly Class. It features Meyhem Lauren, and is sounding real nice. Listen below.
Masta Killa – ‘The Return of the Masta Killa’ feat Capadonna
Wu-Tang members Masta Killa and Capadonna have joined forces for new track The Return of the Masta Killa, and its a banger. The beat is by the always-reliable PF Cuttin, and you can listen below.
Why the Wu’s Once Upon A Time in Shaolin is ridiculously smug
The decline in music sales over the last 15 years has had a huge impact on record companies and artists. For us listeners though, it’s been great. We can stream whole albums and listen to millions of tracks for free, we get treated to a constant selection of new music on Soundcloud, and get to enjoy the various other new ways music is now distributed by labels and artists hoping to squeeze at least a tiny bit of sales revenue from us. None of this was available in the old world, where we still actually purchased millions of records.
And then there’s the RZA and the rest of the Wu-Tang Clan; those aging Shaolin monks, desperate to keep the lights on in that old crumbling Wu Mansion. In a perfect world, the group that made such innovative music 20 years ago would return to innovative yet again, re-forming like Voltron to save the industry.
Instead, they’ve presented us with the prospect of a one-off, million-dollar album. Nice one guys. Well done for supporting the music revolution, where the listener is always meant to be king.
The entire concept of Once Upon A Time In Shaolin might not come across as quite so smug and conceited if it was being pitched by artists who are actually relevant. The Wu haven’t made a good album since Wu-Tang Forever, and that was poor in comparison to classic debut Enter the Wu-Tang (36 Chambers).
In the midst of the hype surrounding the ‘secret’ album, the group dropped A Better Tomorrow, another lacklustre offering, which, unsurprisingly, failed to shift many units. If they can’t even put in the effort to make a commercially available album good, then why should we believe that Once Upon A Time In Shaolin will be anything other than Wu-by-the-numbers? At this point it’s probably damn near impossible for the group to make a good record. Complacency set in years ago, with even the most talented members happy to simply phone it in, probably literally (you didn’t think they record these things in the same room at the same time anymore, did you?).
Millions of dollars were offered up for the mythical album during the peak of it’s media coverage, and this week, as the album is about to go up for auction as a piece of ‘art’, news has arrived that if someone does manage to buy it, they would need to wait a quick 88 years until the copyright expires and copies can be made. Again, incredibly smug. It looked at one point as though the entire thing may have been a gimmick to promote A Better Tomorrow. But that has come and gone, while the secret album story continues to grow.
What RZA and the rest of the clan should do is liberate the album by giving it away for free. Time it nicely as a freebie in the run up to the release of a decent new Wu-Tang album, or maybe as a bonus edition. That way, the music gets to be heard, and no one has to spunk millions of dollars for it. That would be innovative.
UPDATE: For what its worth, Method Man agrees!
Album Review: Ghostface Killah’s 36 Seasons
While everyone else was talking about the Wu-Tang Clan reunion album, the most talented member of the group modestly announced that his latest solo record would be dropping exactly one week after A Better Tomorrow.
36 Seasons is Ghostface Killah’s eleventh album, and its another decent addition to an almost impeccable back catalog (the less said about Ghostdini: Wizard of Poetry in Emerald City the better).
Most GFK albums have some sort of loose story arc, but this one is billed as being a full-on concept album. In reality, the concept is pretty close to the same one on every other joint since his classic debut, Ironman, but this is no bad thing.
Similar to the 2013 Adrian Younge-assisted Twelve Reasons to Die, the music is something of a departure for Ghost, with different beats to what we are perhaps used to. Production is handled primarily by The Revelations, with some tracks nothing more than soulful interludes from the street drama happening in the narrative. Nice idea but hardly new, and after a while most of the beats start to sound the same. Intriguingly, Blood on the Streets is co-produced by The 45 King, marking a welcome return for one of the most iconic names in the game.
Surprisingly, and breaking tradition from other Wu solo albums, 36 Seasons doesn’t feature a single member of the Clan. Instead, AZ appears on five tracks, and veteran Kool G Rap features on three. The story behind how the album came about is unclear, but both are odd choices for this many features.
He may be one of the best to ever bless the mic, but G Rap’s heyday was a long time ago, and he’s lost the energy and flair of his many classics. AZ meanwhile has always been an underachiever at best, never quite living up to the promise of Illmatic. Both put in credible performances here, but we’ll take a Ghost and Rae collabo over AZ or G Rap all day long.
The poetry album aside, Ghostface has yet to make a bad album, but hasn’t made a truly great one since Apollo Kids. 36 Seasons won’t go down as one of his best, but an average GFK album is still miles ahead of most other artists, and its definitely a lot better than the long-awaited but lackluster new Wu joint.
36 Seasons is out everywhere, December 9.