4th Disciple delivers one of the album’s better productions with "Miracle", but a drippy, beatless chorus and melodramatic coda hack the momentum out from under suspenseful verses. Where overbearing arrangements don’t get in the way, a cloying sentimentality does.
Wu tang clan forever tracklist full#
Sounds that were once punishing, tumbling out of shoddy recording equipment in a home studio, are distractingly pretty, pumped full of all the crack session playing A Better Tomorrow favors. Inspectah Deck and Cappadonna come off uncharacteristically plodding over the fluid, proggy groove of "Mistaken Identity". "Felt" practically drowns memorable turns from Ghostface Killah and Method Man in unnecessary drum-n-bass flourishes. But A Better Tomorrow’s thick and moody soundscapes run off-puttingly perpendicular to the group’s cerebral storytelling. The production here is more of a piece with the muscular soundtrack work of RZA’s 2012 directorial debut The Man With the Iron Fists than anything bearing the Wu-Tang name, barring the heavily orchestrated bits of 2007’s 8 Diagrams that inspired Raekwon’s last mutiny attempt. Tense negotiations and a reconciliation followed, but A Better Tomorrow arrives this week illuminating the early apprehensions. The new album had a name ( A Better Tomorrow, after the emotional Wu-Tang Forever cut) but no fully functioning group to record it. Raekwon publicly challenged RZA’s authority and boycotted the sessions. Work was plagued by old complaints about RZA’s lush live band arrangements flying in the face of the claustrophobic kung fu grit of the Clan’s classics. The date came and went, but no album surfaced (though we did get "Family Reunion", a sentimental homecoming over a perhaps-too-chunky slice of the O’Jays’ 1975 hit of the same name). Producer and de facto group leader RZA thought he’d get the guys together for one last job and spent the year trying to will a new Wu-Tang album into existence in time for 36 Chambers’ November anniversary. There was a clean-cut finality to the proceedings, a sense that the group was sending off a movement that had finally run its course. The Wu-Tang Clan’s seminal debut album Enter the Wu-Tang (36 Chambers) turned 20 last fall, commemorated in a litany of glowing reminiscences and a lengthy intercontinental festival tour.
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