Year : 2006
Genre : Hip Hop
Label : Independent
Origin : United States
Official Site : > - here - <
Buy it now
Al Burrell's My Promise VOL. 2 is a significant, surprisingly mature hip hop affair which is available to you since six years, - an exact period in retrospect, as the disc sports a release date of June 30, 2006. Frankly, I'm kind of baffled that this dude did not yet seem to receive more widespread attention from consensus, main reason being that when you invite this spin to let it make you know "wadap", the GTA San Andreas vibe emerges at high octane and invades your receptors 111%. If you are a regular here at Noise Shaft, then you are perfectly aware that you and me had the privilege to hear some solid recent hip hop works already, which puts me into the position to tell you with my poker face applied that this particular one comes from a place deep enough to demand your immediate attention if you consider yourself any kind of a hip hop aficionado. Read on to find out more about this.
Firs of all, your host Al Burrell can rap like there is no tomorrow, as he proves that on second to last entry, "Feelings of Lust", yet the high octane rapping speed is not the sole agenda throughout. We are talking about a massively easy going, mid-tempo overall flow in character, spiced up by an almost obligatory sense of subterfuge-intimidation revealed here and there, that which though never crosses the line of good taste, and sports the tools to handle itself with very easily relatable humanity and irony as well. I especially like the "atmospheric ambient miniatures" of the disc, a set of tracks each clocking in under a minute, addressing the adventures of the Struggling Rap Artist, who is about to Conquer All - which is the threshold minimum ambition for a rap artist - and now you can hear him as he conducts negotiations with a record label Kingpin, and get a brief but hilarious sense of other everyday (?) encounters he is having while seeking to make a solid stand in the culture that he is seeking to reflect.
The premier timber of the music is primordially lush, warm and fuzzy, but not limited to these comforting intentions. Brisker, grittier elements also are claiming and getting a dominant position WITHOUT harming or overshadowing their more gentle surroundings. The establishment of this organic connection sounds to me as one of the steepest challenges in hip hop whenever the intent to create it is on the table, and with great delight I encounter a release that satisfies this criteria with fluent elegance. The musical backdrops share a common denominator of being bravely aggressive in their volumetrics in CERTAIN departments, while limiting secondary ornamentics with taste and a sense of flexible rigor.
The tracks encompass a wide spectrum in temper with all the classic ghetto hip hop registers carefully incorporated, even better : flattered. A "tame variant" of the "12 gauge buckshot with your name on it"-rhetorics is traded in with gentle playfulness for vibrant, lush renditions of a totally peaceful demeanor that would be perfectly content with peace if it would be a reliable option in the PumpAction Jungle, where only the Most Dominant is desirable by the Ebony Goddess with Martini on the $5 000 000 couch, and no, the Japanese android maid with extra suction power is going to cost you some extra, Sir.
The contribution especially is reliant on bravely/surprisingly edited melodic backdrops of gently singed female performance-snippets that are doing a great job countering the energetic rapping of Al Burrell. He sounds completely legit to me, and, for some reason reminds me of the style of 2Pac, though 2Pac usually packs extreme amount of emotive rapping intensity. This here is not required, as this is not a primordially angry hip hop album. It is a primordially SOLID hip hop album that dares to resonate with a certain set of rougher edges around the charismatically coarse corners, which, in this case, only increases its authenticity in my book. All these circumstances are abundantly sufficient to deem this spin an immediate recommendation for the rap aficionado.
Check out Al Burrell's My Promise VOL. 2 here.
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