Benjamin "Benyad" Mor and David "Mazik" Saevitz form Los Angeles hip-hop duo Blood of Abraham. The group signs with Eazy-E's Ruthless, which releases this socio-conscious record, which is quite rare for the former NWA label.
The production of this effort of nearly an hour and fourteen songs without interludes or skits, is done by Bilal Bashir, Bret Mazur and Donny Nguyen. The rhythms provided by these guys are inconsistent, sometimes they guessed the samples, other times they come up with cheap rhythms with annoying samples ("Southern Comfort"; "Father of Many Nations", longer cut present in the tape with over five minutes; the cheap rhythm combined with a bad sample and a pounding and slow drum machine don't make listening easy), but most of the beats are accessible, thanks to the skeletal but light jazzy boom bap.
"Stick to Your Own Kind" features YOMO hook on eclectic boom bap, tight, vibrant syncopated skinny drum machine, and smooth, slow syncopated delivery. The following two choices are also discreet, Rafiki Cai offers a spoken intro for "I'm Not the Man", then slow pounding drum, tight and distant looped female sample in the background, boom bap, smooth delivery of rappers. In the second part of the disc, the production manages to stay more cohesive with simple jazzy rhythms and an honest drum: in "Stabbed by the Steeple" the beatmakers find the best bridge of the record with an elegant piano combined with female samples, on the usual boom bap jazzy. The last joint features a posse with Eazy-E and Willonex (on his second song, the first in which he's credited as a soloist), on heavy and raw boom bap, with slow and pounding syncopated skinny drum machine on which the duo delivers syncopated and quick, Willonex doesn't hurt, and Eazy-E is clearly superior to all with his hardcore delivery style.
This duo is amateur, so their rapping is mediocre and a bit weak in some ways, not fully supported by uninspired production, however their lyrics make them stand out from the rest in the game: the duo's lyricism focuses on Jewish identity, one of the few topics completely ignored so far in the hip-hop scene, which makes them one of the best groups to deal with the subject, second only to the Puff Daddy's protégés Rappin Rabbis who in the mid-nineties resumed MC Hammer's "U Can't Touch This" to launch their rap career, in response to Death Row's signature Benedictine Monks, which soon led to one of the first religious wars in hip-hop. Silenced, the duo of Benyad and Mazik will not show up until 2000, returning under Atomic Pop, which had released albums of Public Enemy and Ice-T in the same period. Recommended if you want to go and find out where it all started.
Rating: 6/10.
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