Released back in 2001 and yet for me this album still gets better and better after each listen.
It is a truly special album. By far and large one of the best hip-hop albums I've ever listened to, albums like this don't come along often. It's gone down as one of my favourite albums ever and it's an album with very few flaws.
Cannibal Ox aren’t gangstas or gunslingers, they’re civilians. There’s no machismo to deaden the lyrical impact; their encounter with local thugs, selling crack to kids and waving Glocks in their faces (‘Vein’) is chilling, not least for the impotence of their resulting anger, the humiliation of their powerlessness. And ‘The F-Word’ is an even more startling inversion of the typical Cro-Magnon rap love song than Mos Def’s ‘Ms Fat Booty’. But while these rhymes seem fuelled by disgust and righteous morality, Ox never swap poetics for polemicism; their art never suffers for their honesty.
NME - Sep 12, 2005
I truly recommend any music lover, hip-hop fan or not, to give this album at least one listen.
