Phrentow
Rock You
Sacrifice
Rolling With Heat
WAOK Ay Rollcall
Thought @ Work
The Seed 2.0
Break You Off
Quills
Pussy Galore
Complexity
Something In The Way Of Things In Town
Frogtoon Music Album Info: Phrenology
Published: 07 Jul 2010, 22:58
The Easy-Flowing Things Fall Apart Made The Roots One Of The Most Popular Artists Of Alternative Rap's Second Wave. Anticipated Nearly As Much As It Was Delayed The Proper Studio Follow-Up Phrenology Finally Appeared In Late 2002 After Much Perfectionist Tinkering By The Band — So Much That The Liner Notes Include Recording Dates Covering A Span Of Two Years And Sometimes Histories For The Individual Tracks. Coffeehouse Music Programmers Beware Phrenology Is Not Things Fall Apart Redux It's A Challenging Hugely Ambitious Opus That's By Turns Brilliant And Bewildering As It Strains To Push The Very Sound Of Hip-Hop Into The Future. Despite A Few Gentler Tracks Like The Nelly Furtado And Jill Scott Guest Spots Phrenology Is The Hardest-Hitting Roots Album To Date Partly Because It's Their Most Successful Attempt To Re-Create Their Concert Punch In The Studio. ?uestlove's Drums Positively Boom Out Of The Speakers On The Talib Kweli Duet "Rolling With Heat" The Fantastic Lean Guitar Groover "The Seed 2.0 " With Neo-Soul Auteur Cody ChesnuTT And The Opening Section Of "Water." The Ten-Minute "Water" Is The Album's Centerpiece A Powerful Look At Former Roots MC Malik B.'s Drug Problems That Morphs Into A Downright Avant-Garde Sound Collage. Similarly Lead Single "Break You Off " A Neo-Soul Duet With Musiq Winds Up In A Melange Of Drum'n'bass Programming And Live Strings. If Moves Like Those Or The Speed-Blur Bad Brains Punk Of "!!!!!!! " Or The Drum'n'bass Backdrop Of Poet Amiri Baraka's "Something In The Way Of Things In Town " Can Seem Self-Consciously Eclectic It's Also True That Phrenology Is One Of Those Albums Where The Indulgences And Far-Out Experiments Make It That Much More Fascinating Whether They Work Or Not. Plus Slamming Grooves Like "Rock You " "Thought @ Work " And The Aforementioned "The Seed 2.0 " Keep Things Exciting And Vital. If This Really Is The Future Of Hip-Hop Then The Sky Is The Limit.