GOOD ALBUM,WITH A TRULY GREAT SONG ABOUT WOMEN(WHATS YER NAME)WORLD CLASS LESSON IN WOMEN IN ONE SONG,FANTASTIC.
March 2, 2008This ain't the Cypress Hill I know. On top of that, they sampled their other albums too much.
May 23, 2006It's like the commercial white man came in and stole all the good rap, then turned it into pop-rap (and I'm white!). I've listened to Cypress since album one -Skull and Bones was somewhat ok, the rest are better though. This Cypress album AT LEAST still tries to stay somewhat true to old school and not this new "happy rap". What did all the ganstas move out of the hood and into the suburbs? You'll be hard pressed to find the old school still trying to do this.
May 11, 2006I've been listening to Cypress Hill since Black Sunday, so my review will be in the context of a pretty solid Cypress Hill fan.
Firstly, as many of the other reviewers have stated, the beats on most of the songs leave a bit to be desired. The production values are good; the music is very clear, except for parts that are intentionally not supposed to be (samples from vinyl, for instance). However, the beats just aren't that memorable. "Another Body Drops," "Street Wars," and "What's Your Name?" are really the only songs that you'll listen to over and over again.
On the other hand, the lyrics are outstanding. B-Real's flow has just gotten better by the album. I have all of Cypress Hill's albums on my MP3 player, and while I'm at work I'll listen to them in release date order, and you can really see how B-Real has improved his skills as a lyricist over time. His rhymes keep getting tighter and tighter, and I really believe that he's a fairly under-appreciated rapper. Let me state, however, that as someone else here said, the hooks suck. You can tell that they couldn't figure out a catchy hook, so they just repeated the name of the song (see the song "Dollar Bill"). This is a probem that started on Skull and Bones, and I think it's just going to continue.
I personally believe that III: Temples of Boom was the Hill's greatest album. It was so dark and moody, and Mugg's beats were almost dank and dungeon-like. Everything before III was Cypress Hill trying to find their identity, and everything after was them moving a little more towards the mainstream rap circle. I'm not saying they sold out, it's just that their music has become a little more of what one would expect from a rap group. If you don't have III: Temples of Boom, you need to buy it. It's one of my favorite albums of all time. Till Death Do Us Part, however, is a more mundane and forgettable chapter in Cypress Hill's history.
April 1, 2006 |  | Beyond the slaughterhouse |  |
It is the best - or one of the best - rap group I know because their words are perfect in their violence and yet deeper than just plain violent ? They contain suffering that gives the violence a density it wouldn't have otherwise. But the best part of this group is the musical background which is an essential part of the work, of the art of theirs. Their music has a classical dimension that we could easily compare or trace back to some great classical, romantic or even baroque music. The metallic drums are of course fooling no one. The other instruments or sounds are very close to what they could be in - to shock if I can some classicists - Tachaikovsky and other Russian composers of that generation, but also the whole palette of the American symphonists, or Dvarak, and so many others. They mix musical sounds with the greatest pleasure in the musical orgy they create this way. Don't be afraid if you get some mexican atmosphere, suddenly, in one piece. But is this CD, is this musical score, concert, work, what its title announces ? Is it a death rite, a funeral danse, a danse macrabre, a requiem of modern times, what we also called a long time ago a Descente aux Ténébres, a Descent into Tenebrae ? Yes it sure is, yes, definitely yes. A descent into Hell and an attempt to come back alive from that voyage to the Kingdom of Death and Hecate. And the darkness is not only in the destination. It is everywhere in the language, in the accents, in the intonations, in the looks of the sound. Everything slightly colorful has its place here no matter how little. This is a CD of darkness, of all the shades of black and dark grey, a voyage underground to better know what is on top of this bloody earth, I mean an earth where blood seems at times to be running in the riverbeds or in the city gutters just as if the monsoon were coming from the exhaust pipe of a slaughterhouse, and guns are at hand everywhere grasped by angry fingers that only want to compensate their frustration by pulling on the trigger or by stabbing a back with a blade. Sure signs of an impotent world in which fertility has been reduced to sterile masturbation of a mind completely sterilized by the cult of weapons and violence. This is the vision Goya has made famous in so many of his drawings. Picasso made it a masterpiece with his Guernica. Bosch and Brueghel have made all that apocalyptic chaos more famous than any painting about the descent into Hell or the Last Jusgment adorning so many walls of so many romanesque churches in Europe. That's the inspiration of these Cypress Hill and they real give you the desire to ****** (there will never be enough stars) this cynical world.
Dr Jacques COULARDEAU, Université Paris Dauphine, Université Paris I Panthéon Sorbonne
December 23, 2005More reviews at Amazon.com ...
(52 reviews)
