MUSIC REVIEW: Remedy Meets Wu-Tang

“Bong ! Bong!”, The 36 Chambers have once again been reopened by none other than an N.Y. emcee named Remedy. From the look of his releases on Discogs, Remedy has been quiet for a little over a decade, so this collaboration with the Wu is the perfect route to put eyes and ears on the spectacle of real rhyme slinging.

The record plays like a Killa Beez Swarm mixtape. Throwing listeners back into a family affair, where these lyrical swordsmen build upon each others strengths to create tapestries that could only have been designed by the Wu-wordsmiths. Even with the grey visibly in the beards of these poets in the video for the LP’s street single, “Crazy 8’s” – the topics on “Remedy Meets Wu” are relevant and pressing as discussion on topics ranging from fascist vaccination passports to ethnic inequalities become focused in amongst tracks that beg for a revival for bygone era’s filled with their own dangers, warning listeners of the cyclical existence that one is faced with when trapped amongst the bands of conceptualized time.

These topics are all raised amongst tracks that sprinkle in ODB samples (because there is no Wu without the good Doctor), Ghostface bragging about having bulletproof skull caps on a track where Griselda honcho Conway has the shell-flying ad-libs as per usual, RZA and Cappadonna competing on who can make the illest superhero references (see : “Supreme Intellect” & “Killa Bee Invasion”) and yet another reworked version of The Purple Tape Anthem in “Ice Cream” still keeps it’s cool as the Wu has after all these years.

The biggest highlights though come within the window with Killah Priest telling one of the most eerie and thought provoking tartarus tales through Charon led trails on “Noir Story”, as Remedy closes the album solo with a recount of the Holocaust, representing for his Hasidic heritage, and posing the challenge in this Orwellian world for listeners to challenge popular demand calls for selling out the next man as the cool new online “challenge”.

With a punctuation like that, Remedy can hold his own. And with tracks such as “Sparrow” and the empowering “To Say The Least” serving as the prelude to such an ending, the only drawback to this album is that it took the effort of the entire Wu to hop on this LP and cosign this ecletic emcee who’s been buried for over a decade. A travesty for the Hip-Hop community, now that this work has finally come to light, that with the skill level Remedy rhymes at that he still needed a cosign. A constant thorn in the side of the Hip-Hop culture, but listeners can take comfort in the fact that if they take to chance to meet Remedy through his meeting with the legendary Wu-Tang here on this LP, that they are without a doubt listening to another classic LP , Wu or otherwise. Sometimes it is nice to be guilty by association.

Score : 5/5

*Produced by himself along with Danny Caiazzo, the Staten Island veteran releases 14 songs which is lead by his collaboration by Inspectah Deck “Death Defying“, “The Pulpit” which features appearances by Ghostace Killah, Capadonna, and Conway The Machine, and the most recent posse cut “Crazy 8’s” featuring Ghostface Killah, Method Man, Inspectah Deck, Masta Killa, Cappadonna, Solomon Childs, and StreetLife . The project also includes collaborations from the RZA and Shyheim.