Czarface - Every Hero Needs a Villain (2015)
I've started watching "Breaking Bad" recently, and yeah, I know I'm late to the party, but it's pretty good and has inspired me, as a nice young Christian man, to start selling methamphetamine to children, and when the cops come, I just say I'm LARPing, they slap me on the wrist, and then they take away the rabid children that are clawing at the sides of my trailer. Really nice of them. What's also nice is that this time around, 7L has changed the production a lot since the first album. I mean, "Nightcrawler (feat. Method Man)" is great with its ol' ragtime dandy feeling, "World Premier (feat. Large Professor)" has got a nice grimy feeling to it, and there are more examples I could throw out, but you get the point. The guest features are pretty interesting this time around, with Method Man, GZA, MF DOOM (of COURSE he'd eventually end up on a Czarface track) and R.A. the Rugged Man being the obvious highlights, and they bring the lyrical heat along with the obvious Esoteric & Inspectah Deck combo, but while this album is good, it isn't -great-. I really can't say anything negative about this album because it's certainly enjoyable, the MCs sound more alive and engaged than on the last album, and there's plenty of lines that actually made me laugh or even sit back like "fuck, that's a good line", but there isn't much on here that makes me want to show all of my friends outside of a few. It has great crossover appeal between hardcore hip-hop fans and people who just like getting absorbed in a good comic book, but there's still something vital missing from this. Maybe they need more Method Man, maybe they just need more meth. Czarface, in the words of the Romans, hmu
7/10
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Feel free to check out the song previews/buy this album using my Amazon Associate link!
