At the turn of the millennium, the rappers on New York-based indie label Def Jux conducted odd science experiments on hip-hop, making restless, lyrically knotty records that pushed the art form towards new extremes of obliqueness. One of the label’s earliest and most beloved releases was The Cold Vein, the debut LP from Cannibal Ox, a duo made up of two Harlem rappers with names like Transformers characters (Vast Aire and Vordul Mega). The group’s sound was vaguely familiar, with clear roots in Wu-Tang, Gravediggaz and Kool Keith, but it was distinguished by moments of sharp surrealism, linguistic deconstructions, and a deep underlying sadness. Def Jux co-founder and producer El-P’s beats enhanced the unfamiliarity of the landscape, traversing a no-man’s-land between the dusty swing of boom-bap and glitchy electronica.
In the decade and a half since the release of The Cold Vein, Cannibal Ox have released only a few songs together. They fell out with El-P, cut their ties at Def Jux, and mostly receded from view. Following a string of one-off reunions on Vast’s solo albums, the two rappers have been crying wolf about a new full-length for the last few years. It’s arrived, by way of their own Iron Galaxy Records, in the form of the sprawling 19-track collection Blade of the Ronin. In some ways, the album resembles its predecessor. Both are distinctly overwhelming sets of songs—collections of dense verses strung between equally verbose refrains—backed by hazy samples, damaged synth insulation and chunky breakbeats. But Ronin feels ponderous and self-conscious in a way that is at odds with the unfettered creative spirit of their first effort.
Though this album, too, is full of offbeat and athletic bars—clearly, the work of the same guys—the familiar soothsayer mysticism often feels like it’s been laid on too thick, or just misplaced. After all, Ox’s most far-flung moments on The Cold Vein got their mileage from meaningful framing, with often-heartbreaking autobiographical imagery serving as the catapult into the rappers’ pan-religious parables and comic book fan fiction. Just as Bastian imagines The Neverending Story while reading alone and hiding from bullies, the young versions of Vast and Mega dream up alternate realities after "stealing Marvel comics and water uzis" and decamping from the action on their block. But on Ronin, we’re usually trapped in their diorama, getting only a few glimpses of its inspiration.
The handful of powerful connections to the outside world are made mostly by Vordul Mega, the group’s more reticent half. On "Harlem Knights", for instance, Mega spends one of the album’s economically sketched verses describing concrete images of a misspent, grief-punctuated childhood. He steals the Black Milk-produced "Gotham (Ox City)" with his opening couplet—"We stay in shape like Porsches on blocks/ Where women is gorgeous and kids stay strapped like Bugs Bunny Jordans"—before the song detours toward less inspiring talk of "New York Gritty" and Clayface.
It seems strange that Can Ox’s new work would run dry on the white-knuckled realism which was once so important to them, but the shortage becomes clear after dozens of verses padded out with half-cogent, free-associative rambling and clunky insult humor. Vast Aire’s contributions are often fun and always inimitable—it would be hard to imagine almost any other rapper selling "You will never see the vipers when they come out the sand/ You will never see the cobra head, as it expands" before "I change my skin like Zartan". However, his lines of thinking quickly veer in cringeworthy ("These girls is like Frankenstein/ They got fake hair, fake nails and monster behinds"), superfluous ("You gotta say my name backwards like Mxyzptlk/ Hold up, did I mention/ I like to fight imps from the fifth dimension") or lazy directions ("My kids are rough, they eat iron candy/ My girl's tough, she wears iron panties/ I was born in an iron galaxy").
The album is also impeded by its uniform, relentlessly bleak production. Producer Bill Cosmiq paints his synth pads and samples on thick, creating muffled washes of midrange sound. The snares thud rather than pop, ringing out as if from a bunker to which everyone in New York has flocked to prepare for the end of days. There are moments of resourceful coloration and melody: see, for instance, the high, mournful vocal sample on "The Power Cosmiq" or the tack piano melody and orchestral flourishes on "Salvation". But whereas El’s beats on The Cold Vein were aberrant in their very syntax—full of disconcerting rhythmic faultlines, eerie melodic hooks and a sense of space—the curiosities in Cosmiq’s work feel tacked on and vestigial.
There’s no doubt that Blade of the Ronin is the work of two very particular and oversized personalities, but the album does not feel like either a blast of fresh air or a return to form after wayward solo careers. Where The Cold Vein felt like an alien object dropped to Earth, Ronin arrives in 2015 sounding a bit commonplace. That’s not totally Can Ox’s fault: By now, indie rap of this sort has become a recognizable subgenre in the wake of so many DOOM alteregos, Anticon releases and a continuing stream of Internet-celebrated underground rappers with absurd or psychedelic tendencies. But unfortunately Vast and Mega’s work here does not serve to remind us of the superiority of the genuine article, or work to resensitize us. Like a new Paranormal Activity movie, a greasy-spoon diner cheeseburger or the last Warhol screen print at the museum, it will be worth its weight for hardcore fans who appreciate alterations to a template. But even those who decided years ago that this album was going to be great will be hard-pressed to find a great rap record here, only a sporadically enjoyable one.
