Fishscale

Various factors have contributed to helping me to get motivated to listen to some of my considerable backlog of music. The biggest factor is the return of the commute which I have always found a great opportunity to listen to new music.

I've added a bunch of music to my library over the past few days, this is only the tip of a very large iceberg of 2006 music I have not yet listened to. The backlog will be dealt with, at least for the albums I am keen to give a good listen to. That said, I make no promises to give adequate time to the large amount of eastern European black metal I've acquired over the past six months, much of it is very raw and I know I can only really evaluate when I'm in the right frame of mind.

One of the things I traditionally do at the end of the year is look at what the slightly more mainstream press thinks was worthwhile listening for the year. This usually consists of alt/indie rock that is often lacking a long term appeal and has been primarily seized upon by reviewers seeking the next rock revolution. That said, there is often some genius and gems to be found perusing the aforementioned lists.

I've noticed a lot of mainstream press rated Wu Tang member, Ghostface Killah's album Fishscale highly this year. In itself i found this a bit strange as Wu Tang as a whole have never really recovered from their mid 90s peak to produce a consistently good release since then. However as loosely defined solo artists, the Wu Tang have produced over 100 releases, with widely varying quality but including one of my all time favourite rap albums - GZA's 1995 album Liquid Swords.

Fishscale is a solid album, with quality production and Ghostface's trademark verbose somewhat inaccessible wordplay. It's quality and enjoyable but not on the same consistency as the mid 90s output from this collective. That said, it's remarkably close, despite the lack of traditional production partners. In many ways it's both much more mature and still significant, a somewhat surprising development really as many had written this collective off long ago.

Personally I look forward to the shortly forthcoming Ghostface/MF Doom collaboration, as I think this partnership has strong potential based on the MF Doom produced tracks on Fishscale.