Ghostface Killah “Fishscale” (2006)
It’s been a bit of a gap since Wu-tang have shown up on this list in any
form. I suspect Raewkon’s “Only Built 4 Cuban Linx” (which heavily
featured Ghostface Killah) might have been the last. In that time GK
had released a few solo albums, an album with his rap collective
Theodore Unit, guested on a bunch of other artist’s releases and had
temporarily dropped the ‘Killah’ from his name.
This was hailed as one of GK’s best, most cohesive albums for a while
and (without being that familiar with most of his work) I could get
behind that. As with many hip-hop albums of this era, it’s overlong,
running 65 minutes or so. It has 24 tracks but plenty of those are
short skits or nice brief tracks below the 3-minute mark, so things
don’t get stagnant.
The mix of producers doesn’t prevent the album coming across as a
cohesive work, though I did prefer J Dilla’s tracks,
especially the catchy, quirky “Whip You With a Strap”. I believe J Dilla released some solo stuff too, so might need to check on that. MF Doom’s “Underwater” is also enjoyably interesting and sonically feels like it lives up to its name.
There are some quite RZA-esque beats here. That, mixed with the film
dialogue samples ties it nicely into the Wu-niverse, even though it
seems to throw in a lot more soul samples and horns and whatnot.
