The last Wu-Tang Clan album was denounced by Raekwon from the group as 'fucking hippie hip hop'; he could hardly have imagined how much worse things were about to get. For his third solo album as his blaxploitation superhero alter ego, Wu founder the RZA retains many of the cast who featured on 8 Diagrams (George Clinton, Dhani Harrison, Chili Pepper John Frusciante) and adds Shavo Odadjian of prog-metallers System of a Down. But the most telling contributions come from Thea van Seijen, an unknown Swedish singer and sonic ringer for Bianca from folktronic weirdos CocoRosie.
Her presence on an album from the driving force of a hardcore rap collective is a little like finding Portishead showing out for the Kaiser Chiefs. But her girlish vocals signpost a new direction for RZA, one derived from the darker corners of his soundtrack work. The kinetic pile-up of strings, synths, and samples that marked Wu's ascent is just a memory here, replaced by a scrapyard of simple sound effects, plodding beats and RZA's assortment of comic-book non sequiturs and uplift-the-people raps ('I'm like, damn homey, that's poverty/ He's like, word OG, that bothers me'), notably on 'You Can't Stop Me Now', which channels the Temptations' song 'Message From A Black Man'. It's an album likely to confound and alienate, but its nooks are home to a rugged kookiness that no one but RZA could pull off.
Download'You Can't Stop Me Now'
