eMusic Review
To the uninitiated this may sound like hyperbole, but a simple first-time scan of its twelve tracks should be proof enough: there's not a single weak beat on Hell Hath No Fury.
Part of that is down to the album's brevity: no skits where the jokes went stale before the tape stopped rolling; no sensitive b-boy cops to the quiet storm demographic, backed up by some generic R&B crooner of the moment; no half-assed attempts at fusions with pop, country or rock. Just a dozen mid-tempo, menacing bangers that buzz and squeal with a weird, ugly energy — synthetic soundtracks for idling in a big car and shooing passersby with your bass-bin fuzz.
The other key to Fury's all-killer-no-filler success is its producer list: the Neptunes. That's it. In a decade when hip-hop albums became all-star dog's dinners, with a half-dozen or more big-name producers contributing beats with wholly incompatible vibes, this one-trackmaster line-up gives Fury a coherence that makes it listenable from-end-to end. It helps that the album also served as a delivery system for the Neptunes 'last batch of truly great, truly strange beats (so far). Calling them "stark" makes these barely-embellished rhythms seem too bustling and full of… read more »