Just the name of this project feels ominous. It seems hip hop has a new dark horse, and this man might be it! Someone to take the reins of the deeper depths of the underground, the more noise and experimental heavy. The type of hip hop that ain’t for the weak of heart, and that’s the exact genre push that I crave! Let’s go!
This is the brand-new album by MC (and producer) No Shadow, representing Jackpot Records! Featuring 11 tracks that are guaranteed to push how you see, feel, and touch hip hop in general.
When I first listened to this project, I honestly felt my ears become sensitive to the sheer abrasive nature of the record! The production itself is purposefully eerie, raw, and avant-garde in execution!
It’s so fucking grimy and rough around the edges that it brings a certain sense of danger and uncertainty to the atmosphere that I honestly couldn’t get enough of!
In what resembles (to me) an influence combination of people like -DATKIDBRAVO and -Al Divino, you hear that messy yet controlled chaos dynamic combined with that underworld depths of grime.
It’s like you’re listening to an aftermath of a car crash; it’s completely unhinged, but for the niche audience who appreciate sounds such as that, I know it’s going to resonate, and more so I feel the audience of Jackpot Records.
The other aspect that caught me off guard (considering its brash nature) was the level of cohesiveness and structure to the production. There does feel to be a sense of reason to the songs being placed where they are and connecting one to the other! Like how violence amplifies even more violence! I feel the same sense of progression for this album. In its own twisted way, there is fluency, and it makes for a score so unsettling that it would put most cinema soundtracks to shame!
If the production is so wild, it only sets the stage for No Shadow. A man I haven’t heard from yet, but one who only needed one album to prove his worth and why he should be one to look out for in the coming future, and he did that AND THEN SOME!
This man possesses what I’d say is a new generation of the iconic ‘splash style’. He’s all over the place on this record, but in a sharp, distinctive, and brutally accurate manner that sets him apart from the rest!
His lyricism and wordplay are coated in precision. His performance is wild, unkempt, and savage like a wild animal roaming its habitat, preying on any unwelcome visitors to approach him!
His rapping style is entertaining. It’s vibrant (in a gritty way). He’s verbally aggressive and has a hypnotic presence about him across these beats. There’s something about his frantic flow that makes you hang on his every word, in a sort of anticipation of what could come next since he’s so unpredictable!
You can feel it in how he says the words and delivers them that he’s completely in his element. This is his wheelhouse (as a producer of his own beats). He’s comfortable yet hungry for more, hungry to elevate each and every song and bar that he drops, and that’s why I feel there’s such a vibe of ‘animosity’ in the air!
It stems from his hunger to make more, say more, DO MORE! He’s a workhorse who I feel is using this album as a reflection of what he’s capable of and what’s to come in the future, and this could mark a new lane for Jackpot and his artist, but one thing is for certain:
This will not be the last time we hear or see of this man, and I guarantee you his upcoming discography is going to be art-worthy!
The Serpent Tongue Reviews 