What makes a Wu-Tang Clan album? If you guessed one member overseeing a Brooklyn soul crew (The Revelations) recreating samples live in the studio, to which other members would drop in and rhyme, you'd be right. But by any other definition, Chamber Music is not a proper Wu-Tang album.
The forthcoming Chamber Music compilation, due June 30 from E1 Music/Universal, is being hailed as "a welcome flashback to the era when it felt like a new Wu-affiliated album came out every week." It's being packaged and promoted as a callback to the old styles, the original grit. How you can do that without the complete involvement of all players involved, much less with ODB six feet under, is beyond me - but I'm not the one writing the checks.
Chief orchestrator RZA put his own spin on it: “This album has a very live element of today’s musicians playing the vibe of Wu-Tang. The vibe we would normally sample, the vibe of things that we would accumulate through old soul songs, jazz songs, kung fu movies, whatever, now you’ve got musicians that can play this vibe with Wu-Tang MCs rapping over it. The goal of this album is definitely paying homage to our early sound.”
A total of six Wu-Tang members make their presence known at least once on the album, but mostly in small doses. How can Chamber Music be called a proper Wu album without GZA on wax? And where's Meth? I'm unsure, but in his place are an assortment of other rap veterans from the New York scene, including Masta Ace, Sean Price, Cormega, M.O.P. and even Kool G Rap.
Ghostface Killah appears on two tracks, only one of which is noteworthy (the excellent "Harbor Masters"), while Raekwon destroys the mic on "Ill Figures" - but gets his ass handed to him by Cormega and Price on the standout track "Radiant Jewels" (just wait for the line "Fuck a flow, this is the lyrical aquaduct"). Despite the track's quality, the rhyming is so uneven that one wonders why they chose to release it in the first place. If anything, it detracts from the Wu legacy... but that's pretty much the problem with the entire album.
Inspectah Deck, meanwhile, makes a strong showing on "Sound The Horns," another album standout right from the gate, with heavy debt to Sadat X and U-God.
Aside from the liberal use of the Wu name, the biggest beef to be found with the album is that, all filler aside, the album's only eight actual songs - the rest are samplicious segues and random nonsense that don't do much to supplement the tracks with actual meat. "Enlightened Statues" is an exception, a stony step into philosophical self-preservation conversation, but once the rainsticks subside RZA owns the final track, "NYC Crack". Unfortunately, it sounds about as fitting for a Wu-Tang album as a Jay-Z track. It's an uneven fit, an end-tacking move that RZA seemed to want for his own promotional devices.
The album is solid, albeit short, and the live-band sound is a refreshing sidestep - but the fact that Chamber Music is being promoted as a Wu-Tang album is downright misleading. It's essentially a re-run of the piggybacking Wu-Tang Killah Bees album they put out in the early '90s, relying on the Wu-Tang name and peppering a project with flavor from a sampling of the Clan.
CraveOnline's Rating: 7 out of 10 (+1 if you've never heard a Wu album, -1 if you're a die-hard)
