Blackalicious

Blackalicious

The Craft

(Anti)

Three-and-a-half years since their last album, the lustrous Blazing Arrow, Blackalicious return with another helping of their trademark genre-splicing cerebral hip-hop funk. Between times, the duo have spent time on other projects - Gift of Gab released his first solo album, 4th Dimensional Rocketships Going Up, to quiet acclaim last year, and Chief Xcel brought out Maroons: Ambush with long-time Blackalicious collaborator Lateef the Truthspeaker the same year - and it seems to have given the pair fresh impetus to throw something extra into the pot this time around.

All the elements that created their distinctive sound on previous albums are present and correct, from esoteric jazz, funk and soul samples to Gift of Gab's jaw-dropping rhyming skills, but The Craft features significantly more live instrumentation than before. Blended seamlessly with samples, this gives the album a more vital and marginally more poppy sound than its laid-back predecessors.

A case in point is the effervescent first single Powers, by far the most chart-friendly cut the duo have ever produced and one with genuine crossover potential. But that's not to say they've gone all mainstream on us. There's more than enough here to ensure their place in rap's underground, not least the pulsating low-slung funk of Lotus Flower, to which grand funk master George Clinton adds his bass-heavy vocal talents, and the New York disco-influenced prison reform yarn The Fall and Rise of Elliot Brown.