Cannibal Ox: Blade Of The Ronin
Mike Diver, The Quietus, 20 March 2015
CANNIBAL OX'S 2001 debut album The Cold Vein was New York hip hop given the bumps by a clutch of skin-peeled T-800s, shaken by ice-core electrics and keys clawed from the crust of Ganymede. It was supremely slick but spooked, too, like EPMD gone goth on a Coney Island ghost train, or Wu-Tang's paranoid prose filtered through future-facing mythology as well as razor-edged expressions of domestic difficulties. Naturally, the album barely brushed the mainstream, only accumulating respectable sales over a period of several years.
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