Raekwon The Chef, Only Built 4 Cuban Linx

Raekwon The Chef, Only Built 4 Cuban Linx - Complex, psychologically challenging, eerie, lucid genius, RZA beats. Abstract, syllable packed, aggressively delivered, mind-blowing rhymes.

How can you seriously describe this musical masterpiece, though? How can you describe an album that's as rough as sandpaper but as beautiful and mellifluous, and smooth as this?

And I say "musical masterpiece." Although this album is pure, inventive hip hop that simply isn't made like this anymore, it quite simply transcends just this one genre.

Ghostface Killah and Raekwon's amazingly-delivered, sometimes uncomprehensibly abstract stories manage to paint a beautiful and vivid picture of the New-York project resident state-of-mind. This is heavy material, for some, overwhelming and intimidating, but this is what makes it great.

Take "Glaciers of Ice," opening with Ghostface waffling to Raekwon excitedly and powerfully about his fantastical ideas of his beloved Clarks Wallabees over the background noise of faint radio playing Hot 97. It sounds as if you're listening in on a private converstion of two friends on the street. After a minute, in fades in RZA's classic thumping, tense and edgy, looping beat with sound effects that are simply pure inspiration that I respect too much to try to describe in words. It simply has to be listened to. For the chorus, a woman's strained voice begins on her scream that slowly rises and rises until she reaches window-smashing pitch.

This album is intense; it's from artists who were in a very intense mind-set, who are getting irritated by the realisation that their brand of hip hop is being plagiarised, this though never really happened, for the simple fact no-one could. But the influence is clear in a lot of def-jux type hip hop now. They were riding a wave of creative pureness that wasn't interupted by the commercialsm or pressures many hip hop artists succumb to in our present times. I even a doubt this much creative freedom would be allowed to any hip-hop artist now. This album is nowhere near marketable, it's far too complex and heavy for most people to digest.

If you're new to hip-hop (last 4/5 years) buy this, and educate yourself on this. Try to imagine it out now. Impossible? That says a lot about the state of the hip-hop scene.