Released: 2022
Word of mouth records are of course, just that. You hear something you feel everyone else needs to hear but probably hasn’t, then you tell ten of your friends so they can share in the revelation too, plus you look, y’know, pretty cool into the bargain.
Released in 1999, The Roots Things Fall Apart was just that kind of gum-bumping moment. With hip-hop then dominated by commercially successful but culturally skinny materials, the Philadelphian collective artfully mixed subject matter with gravity and soul, jazz and effortless beats, looking simultaneously backwards and forwards.
The group’s most prominent MC and co-founder Black Thought was still open to side projects though and, six years later (That’s in 2005) he began to thread through some work on tracks with producer Danger Mouse. What happened next depends on who you’re listening to, but it was a further twelve years until the serious work began on what would become Cheat Codes, Brian Joseph Burton’s first hip-hop album since his collaboration with MF Doom The Mouse and The Mask
Almost two decades in the making, Cheat Codes didn’t feel like a time lagged grab bag, instead locking into groove after groove. Strangers added A$AP Rocky and old stalwarts Run The Jewels to the roster, but the end result was predictably slick and relentless, a boogie that might’ve been first conceived twenty years or twenty minutes ago. Word of mouth? It didn’t really need it, and any talking necessary it did for itself.
The Voice Of Unreason 