Sunday, September 20, 2009
Cappadonna - Slang Prostitution (Chambermusik)
Slowly crawling out of the hole he dug with 2001's The Yin and the Yang plus 2003's The Struggle, Cappadonna makes good with Slang Prostitution, a better yet still uneven effort that finally arrived in early 2009 after more than a year of delays. It's overstuffed at 19 tracks, and hard ballers like "Life's a Gamble" with Raekwon seem out of Capp's reach here, but when the off-kilter Wu-Tang rapper turns to mischief, women, or something breezy, he excels. The out of tune swaggering on "Walk with Me," the hazy nostalgia of "Stories," and the wonderfully spaced-out "Da Vorzon" all work splendidly, but it's the "biddy-biddy-bop" jazz of "Somebody's Got to Go" that towers over all with the lyrics bouncing all over G-Clef da Mad Komposa's almost-Us3 production. The redundant songs plus three chapters of the tedious spoken word piece "You Can't Keep a Good Man Down" keep this one off the top tier, but fans will recall the good ol' days when Capp explains how he's living the "Savage Life" with the throwback stinger "To animals/My words be the words of Christ."
Q-tip - Kamaal/The Abstract
A personal, unique project compared to Amplified (Q-Tip's first under his own name), Kamaal the Abstract fittingly sounds more like a solo album; whereas Amplified merely built on the digital soul of the last Tribe Called Quest album (The Love Movement), this one is wide-ranging and diverse, a relaxed, loose-limbed date. Q-Tip lays way back on these cuts, rapping in a quick, low monotone for the opener, "Feelin'," even while the song breaks into some restrained guitar grind on the choruses. Guitars, in fact, crop up all over this record. Setting aside comparisons to the contemporary record by N.E.R.D. (the rock side project of hip-hop super-producers Neptunes), Q-Tip crafted a record that pays homage to the last gasp of organically produced mainstream pop in the '70s and '80s, paying a large compliment to Prince and Stevie Wonder, even as he proves himself far more talented than D'Angelo (if not quite as soulful). The beats are pointed and clipped, to be expected on a Q-Tip record, but he allows plenty of space for the arrangements to speak, like the trim trumpet lines pacing "Even if It Is So" or allowing plenty of room for extended blowing from a flute on the warm, pastoral "Do You Dig You." The former is one of the best tracks here, Q-Tip introducing his story song with a fluid, ten-second speed-rap that says more about the plight of the single mother he adores than any other rapper could with an entire album. This wasn't the kind of record that lights up the charts -- which could account for the reason it didn't appear on the shelves in late April 2002, as expected, and only earned an official release in 2009 -- but in many ways it's superior to the released Amplified. [The 2009 release via Jive included a bonus track, "Make It Work."]
