I've been listening to a bunch of Wu-Tang side projects this week so I thought I owed it to myself to revisit this terrific record which is on the top 100 list anyways.
Liquid Swords came out in 1995 (about a month after I had been born actually) two years after Enter The Wu-Tang had been released and placed the members on the map of hiphop. It's an album that quickly rose to fame and a record that still holds up, twenty years later, due to fantastic use of skits, shining beats and some of the most atmospheric hiphop of the time. Liquid Swords has somewhat of a narrative, which it carries due to its exceptional use of sampling, something that already was popular at the time but hadn't quite been used to the same success as Genius and GZA did on this record. The samples are mostly from the film Shogun Assassin (the film that's briefly featured in Kill Bill 2) and tell the story of a boy having to seek vengeance after the shogun murdered his father.
The narrative isn't incredibly important to the lyrics on the record since only a couple of tracks really rely on the themes of the sampled skits from Shogun Assassin, but they do give the record a certain cold, lifeless feel which would also come to make this record such an atmospheric one, and the one that's the reason behind why this record is almost always recommended as one of the essential hiphop records for the winter.
My first dabble with Liquid Swords was some time when I was first getting into hiphop and when I was mainly interested in the contemporary works of Kendrick Lamar and similar artists. 90's hiphop wasn't really my thing at the time and I had a hard time appreciating the beats on the record, which feels much stronger when paired with the rest of different Wu-Tang members solo output or even when compared to a record like Enter The Wu-Tang where several of the beats feel life less and stale when reassessed twenty years later.
However Liquid Swords came to grow on me and even if it isn't one of my favorite hiphop records, I do believe it's the strongest solo release from any of the different Wu-Tang members, or even Wu-Tang affiliated ones. I love a record that pulls of a certain atmosphere, that can paint these vivid pictures only through the use of words and sounds and it's something that Liquid Swords pulls of effortlessly, much like Illmatic which I wrote about earlier, even if the world that Liquid Swords paints is a very different one compared to the world of Illmatic.
I will not attempt to dissect the lyrics on this record because it's an element of rap that I have a hard time appreciating if I haven't spent a lot of time with the record and something I can't really speak with an educated opinion on when it comes to this record and many others in the genre. The strongest elements of Liquid Swords lies in the beats and the atmosphere. While the beats are a product of their time and can feel a bit stale and repetitive when compared to those of modern beat makers, they still shine when paired against boom bap beats of a similar or earlier era.
Liquid Swords did something original even if it isn't a long step from similar works of the era, and would later come to be recognized as one of the greats of the genre, and a hugely influential work for the hiphop that we would later see during the late 90's and early 00's.
Liquid Swords [1995]
Genius/GZA
7/10
Anton Öberg Sysojev
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