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album reviews

Cypress Hill



Cypress Hill 8½ ( 1991 )
Pigs / How I Could Just Kill A Man / Hand On The Pump / Hole In The Head / Untraviolet Dreams / Light Another / The Phuncky Feel One / Break It Up / Real Estate / Stoned Is The Way Of The Walk / Psycobetabuckdown / Something For The Blunted / Latin Lingo / The Funky Cypress Hill Shit / Tres Equis / Born To Get Busy

Latino gangsta hip-hop? Yes, sir! Rappers B-Real and Sen Dog and DJ Mixmaster Muggs combine as 'Cypress Hill' to produce one of the noteworthy debuts of the decade. They have some of the most distinctive voices ever to emerge from rap, there's no mistaking a Cypress Hill track. This would prove to be both their doing and later on, their undoing as they struggled to provide something else new. For now, we have their debut and it's a super strong selection of fine rap tracks. 'Pigs' immediately gets things going, a tribute to our lovely men in blue, haha. Oh, sixteen tracks in 45 odd minutes means you never get bored with this album. One track finishes, another begins before you've even noticed, this is a very repeat playable rap album and I can't say that about all of them. The beats aren't so heavy you're head hurts. They use samples fairly sparingly so they aren't jumping up and down on top of you, aka Bomb Squad productions. Yet, they also aren't so subtle that you miss them. 'Stoned Is The Way Of The Walk', for example and these were a bunch of stoners. Whereas as Speed or Coke might be a rap artists drug of choice, these guys just got stoned. They may have claimed to talk the truth to the point of being dangerous, but ultimately, how dangerous is a guy that's stoned? Still, for now, their image was fine. Nobody minded too much that they might not have been 'as real' as 2Pac or whatever. Rap music and the hip-hop scene wasn't quite playing such stupid games as yet.

'How Could I Kill A Man' is a great track, one of the highlights here. Squeals and that distinctive voice spells out a message worth thinking about. 'Hand On The Pump' features a 'Duke, duke duke Duke of' sample, missing off the earl, and interestingly, for awhile I was known the 'the duke' at work. No, really! They didn't sing Cypress Hill at me, though. Actually, that wasn't interesting at all was it? No mind! 'Hole In The Head' and 'Light Another' present the slow and the fast respectively, both as effetively as each other. We generally have 'proper' tracks with one or two minute linking tracks, yet even the linking tracks such as 'Something For The Blunted' contain superior beats and funky things. The closing 'Born To Get Busy' caps off an album without an ounce of filler although the first half is definitely better than the second half. 'We can do this bro' they claim and indeed they can. Cypress Hill. You could do far worse than invest in this. They acheived a huge audience amongst rock/alternative fans as well as within the hip-hop community without having to resort to the odd rock/rap crossover. Most rock/rap crossovers are odd too, so props to the guys for that.

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