First things first: Wu-Tang Chamber Music is not a Wu-Tang Clan album, despite the presence of that W logo on the cover. About half the verses on the album come not from Wu members but from fellow Carhartt-era rap vets like Sean Price and Cormega. I guess Old 90s Rap Dudes Chamber Music didn't have the same ring. There's no Method Man, no GZA. RZA doesn't produce any beats, though we do hear his voice over and over. Second: Wu-Tang Chamber Music is only barely an album. Of the 17 tracks on the CD, only eight are actual songs; the rest are strictly interstitial pieces, kung-fu movie samples, or bits of marble-mouthed mythology already familiar to anyone who read The Wu-Tang Manual.
And make no mistake: People who read The Wu-Tang Manual are definitely the target audience here. The mere existence of this LP has a weird late-90s quality to it; it's a throwback to the time when record-store shelves were crammed with with albums by vaguely Wu-affiliated crews like Killarmy and Sunz of Man, when labels would rush out any old crap they could slap that W logo on. A decade on, it's oddly comforting that a label would aim for your Wu-Tang consumer dollar even when that dollar barely exists anymore.
But if Wu-Tang Chamber Music is a hackneyed cash-grab, it's a pretty good hackneyed cash grab. Because once you get past the brevity and the non-Wuness of it all, there is some beautifully executed hardhead grown-folks rap shit on here. The music comes from the Brooklyn soul band the Revelations, who do live-band rap music as well as just about anyone, which is to say that you can't tell you're hearing a live band most of the time. There's an organic old-soul crackle to the incendiary trumpet-bursts on "Sound the Horns" or the slow-rolling bassline on "Ill Figures", but that warmth is the sort of warmth that the better East Coast producers can get out of old records. And so credit might be due to Fizzy Womack, otherwise known as M.O.P.'s Lil Fame, probably the best beatmaker currently working the underground NYC circuit. Fizzy co-produced every actual song on the album, and these tracks have a hard-hitting simplicity that probably serves a quickie all-posse album like this one better than RZA's choked paranoia would. And because the Revelations play music even during the interludes, those bits never fuck up the flow of the album.
And it certainly helps that most of the craggy veterans here, Wu and otherwise, go in hard on this thing. Most of these songs don't have actual choruses, so gnarled shit-talk is the focus here, and the assembled old gods still do it well. On "Ill Figures", Kool G Rap does twisted-up, lispy, half-off-beat gun-talk so well that you'd probably guess he'd been doing it for decades even if you didn't know. Inspectah Deck, on "Sound the Horns", comes with easily one of the top five C. Thomas Howell name-checks I've ever heard on a rap song: "The sound of the horns says it's on / We storm through like C. Thomas, Red Dawn." ("P. Swayze" would've fit in just as well there, but Deck never goes the obvious route.) Cormega remains one of the only rappers who can get away with a line about "lyrical elevation causes mental stimulation" because he throws that in the middle of a verse so jammed with internal rhymes and left turns ("this is a lyrical aqueduct"?) that you only barely notice. Even RZA, never a great rapper, comes with at least one hot line: "My moms put gunpowder inside my Similac."
And in his three appearances here, Ghostface Killah maintains his status as Wu-Tang's MVP, ranting about the shrooms on his tour rider on "Harbor Masters" or kicking unbelievably badass warnings on "Evil Deeds": "Don't ever come at me sideways, hands in ya pocket/ Cuz I will turn to Steven Seagal, rip ya arm out ya socket." But Ghostface's highlight, and the album's, comes on "I Wish You Were Here", the one moment of tenderness in the midst of all those boxcutter threats. Over a slow, quavery soul-jam beat, Ghost bleats out one of those emotive sex-rap verses that he does better than anyone else before ceding the spotlight to a raspy old-school soul clinic from singer Tre Williams, who comes off like Gerald Alston on 8 Diagrams' "Stick Me for My Riches".
So, OK, the various rappers here can lay on the get-off-my-lawn stuff a little thick. (Topics railed against include Hot 97's Summer Jam, skinny jeans, Twitter, and the ever-popular "ringtone rappers".) And there's really no compelling reason for this LP to exist beyond these guys' desire to remind us that they're alive. But I haven't heard an album full of anachronistic tough-guy stuff this satisfying in a long time. The world may have moved on to songs with the word "swag" in the title, but these guys are still out there, spitting grown-man gangsterisms to anyone who will listen. I call that nobility.
