Cypress Hill - Cypress Hill III: Temples of Boom

Four years since the L.A. group's first pro-pot anthem, "Stoned Is the Way of the Walk," Cypress Hill is still telling us they love to smoke ganja. How B-Real and Sen Dog waste their days is their business, but it makes you wonder: What's wrong with their personal lives that they need to be stoned all the time? And how can they be so enthusiastic about it? III (Temples of Boom) exhales the same clouded sentiments of past albums, but offers no answers.

Herb is never far from the conversation on Cypress Hill records--how they smoke more than anyone, how they were rapping about it before anyone--but they never explain why, never suggest they derive something positive (or negative) from pot. Though III's "Illusions" begins with an Indian sitar, presumably a reference to '60s drug culture's Eastern influence, there's no expanded consciousness in the accompanying raps. Cypress Hill champion drug use, it seems, to bolster their outlaw image; they place pot smoke alongside beat-downs, just another illegal activity to prove they're bad dudes. --Roni Sarig

Amazon.com

Cypress Hill's Darkest Album

This is my favorite Cypress Hill album, because it is totally consistent from beginning to end, and has a dark, spooky atmosphere, and some of the most violent, vicious rhymes B-Real has ever done. September 1, 2008

By Far Cypress Hill at their peak

This album must have been played by me over 1,000 times since it was released. The "dark" production and extreme brilliance will never be matched. This is Cypress hill's best album (I have all of them so far). The vocal style, lyrics, excellent production for its time, by far exceeds anything out nowadays. Let's hope to see albums like this in the future, pure hip hop and without a doubt a gem in my collection.

June 30, 2008

No bong necessary

Let's get one thing out of the way right now. I don't smoke pot. I never have. I think it is a foolish choice. (As Daniel Tosh put it "grow up and do cocain like an adult.")

With that stated ... this is in my opinion, Cypress Hill's finest album. I don't know if it's possible to make a goth rap album (a what?!) but this is the closest I've ever seen. Yeah, it's dark ... but there's a jillion skillion dark albums out there in multiple genres. But this one is different. The album has an atmosphere to it that I've NEVER heard in hip-hop before or since. Though it has ZERO in common with Type O Negative ... somehow it reminds me of the atmosphere on Bloody Kisses.

On Production, Muggs always had a sound that was rather signature. But on this one he expands the pallette he paints with and still maintained his signiture. What resulted was a strange concoction of sound few in rap then would dare to use ... and probably NONE in the conformist cesspool of today's rap would even consider trying.

On one hand, every song on this album makes me imagine night. Dark night with the pavement still shining from a recent rain. Yet still the album doesn't feel flat, it travels all over the place with its eerie gloom and grim fog ... that gets punctuated here and there with sparse sounds that sound way too bright and cheerful to belong on this album. And it all works. It shouldn't. It does. If you opt to listen to the whole album from beginning to end you get the sense that you've been taken for a ride in the way that few albums do. Few albums really NEED to be heard as a WHOLE to be truly appreciated but this one does. Some day down the road I think this album will be recognized for what it is, but as yet it hasn't received the full credit as a masterpiece that it deserves. January 10, 2008

Solid CD

Illusions the best song on this cd. It is the highlight to a good cd. One thing in closing about this cd I especially enjoyed was the track where they slam ice cube for ripping off the song for the friday sound track. Nowadays I look for old stuff that is good to listen to because this new garbage people are putting out is the worst music ever. So I am making up ground and this is one classic I missed but I have it now. And you need to get it. July 2, 2007

Cypress Hill's Masterpiece

If there's one album by Cypress Hill that can be considered a genuine classic, this is it. 'II: Temples of Boom' is undoubtedly the best work the talented group has put out. The grim, dark atmosphere here is extremely well-done and doesn't feel forced like in other albums I've heard, and at 15 tracks long there is no fluff or filler here.

My favorite tracks are 'Killafornia' (has one of the best instrumentals ever), 'Boom Biddy Bye Bye', and 'Strictly Hip Hop', but that doesn't mean you should just get the songs individually, this should be listened to in it's entirety because it's a real album. It all goes together.

'IV' is another Cypress Hill album I feel highly of, but even that didn't come close to touching this one (though that's another fantastic album as well). If you own one album by this group 'III: Temples of Boom' should be it. June 13, 2007

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