Album? EP? I don't know. Little emerges clearly from this cloudy, confused and very gray collaborative project created by RZA and DJ Scratch, credited as the unique producer of these seven tracks. There are no guests.
The intro boasts a boom bap with imperfect and dirty midtempo drum and a great piano loop. DJ Scratch's beat is good, but RZA's rusty spoken word delivery is bad, for three minutes he's not saying anything. The producer makes another honest production for the title track, providing a cartoonish and cinematic soundscape, à la Indiana Jones, with that sick horn and the drum machine falling downtempo. To disappoint, once again, is the execution of Bobby Digital: the boy is never inspired, technically he's not receivable by the listener, he recites his lyrics in spoken word, speaking over this rhythm without charism and with a mix that rewards the rhythm instead of his voice. He reminds me of Big Body Bes' "Tears of a Tiger", except that RZA here has no grit or personality, that the rhythm is nowhere near Harry Fraud's, and that he doesn't even have the lyrics at the level of Big Body Bes, who just stepped out of the recording room was aware that he had a classic cut in his hands.
"Pugilism" is track number three of this project. If you listen to it without remembering who is doing what, you might even think this is your generic mumble rapper mumbling random things on a weak East Coast boom bap production. This stuff makes you fall asleep, it's soporific, it's the antithesis of pugilism. Not even DJ Scratch seems to want to scratch. "Never Love Again" was born as a banger, it should be a banger, nevertheless, the combination RZA + DJ Scratch manages to make it one of the most forgettable pieces of this effort. On a tired, limping and shuffling drum, yet somehow faster than usual, this guy delivers badly on a musical carpet the producer fails to take to the next level, despite a certainly iconic sample from the theme of the cult film "Love Story" (1970), a piece made by the Maestro Henry Mancini.
Track number five features an annoyingly tight drum in its unbearable lightness, piano lick that feels useless, hook sung and an execution stuck between slow rapping and spoken word. In "Fisherman", DJ Scratch tries to recreate the Wu 96-97 sound, then it seems that at the last moment the production has turned to one of those salsa rap beats that Big Pun used on his posthumous album: the cornet is dull, there's an attempt to invent a sort of western beat with Hispanic vibes, it would be perfect in one of those apocryphal sequels to "Django" (1966) that Corbucci refused to shoot and that Garrone and Fidani feel they must direct. The drum is tired and tense, the kung-fu sample in the middle of the verses tries to hook the old Wu-Tang fan of the late nineties, I have no idea how much he succeeds in its intent with this rather weak attempt. The whole piece is lazy, without confidence and without personality.
Last, but not least, "Kaiju", which I see as one of the songs most appreciated by the few who have had the courage to face this short but exhausting journey of over twenty-five minutes. This song isn't too different from the previous one in its ongoing quest to finally find the sound that made Bobby Steels famous in the mid-nineties and towards the end of that decade. This beat is stolen by RZA directly from "Peep the Steez" by Buddha Monk of Brooklyn Zu, track of the album "Unreleased Chambers" (2008). This track of Buddha Monk, one his many unknown songs, proving he was closer to the original Wu sound at the time than RZA nearly fifteen years later. The drum is honest, the loop is good, but there's nothing really solid and consistent about these three minutes. I'd like to say that the sample is, but it's not: the portrait chosen by DJ Scratch for this rhythm is extracted directly from the magnificent "Mothra's Song", a song features in a compilation of tracks about the Godzilla movies ("The Best of Godzilla 1954-1975 (Original Film Soundtracks)", 1998) and which is part of the flick "Mothra" (1961).
The song is credited to the composer Yuji Koseki, but it's performed by the uncredited duo of singers The Peanuts. This sample could be the exception that saves the track, but its use here is subordinated to the rhythmic solution decided by DJ Scratch: not only does the sample not have the possibility to validate the entire piece of RZA, but it's subdued to it, it's kept aloof in the background instead of being allowed to breathe over the course of the track as it rightly deserved to do. The Peanuts voice sounds more powerful and dominant in the original track, with the singers stretching every last syllable to give epic inflections to their performance, creating a cinematic track that fits perfectly into the film, while in this song by The Abbot, the singers' voice sounds simply in outline, without its own meaning, as if it were just another interchangeable sample in a project that will fall by the wayside.
It's not too far from RZA good records, but it's still far, the relatively short duration of the project, of just over twenty-five minutes, it's severely undermined by songs that are saying nothing, at the expense of acceptable DJ Scratch production. It might interest fans of the two artists and the artwork is pretty good — you might wonder what that "vs. Bobby Digital" at the bottom of the cover means before realizing that the artist actually put "RZA" in that vampire denture, using the same color by the way — nevertheless, I take the liberty of not recommending listening. 4.5/10.
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