Thursday, June 2, 2011

KRS-One & Bumpy Knuckles - "Royalty Check"


Although Freddie Foxxx first announced a full-length collaboration with The Blastmaster back in 2008, this pretty much came out of nowhere for me. Alot of hip-hop albums gets promised and that's pretty much it but this actually has materialized and I'm listening to it right now. I checked the ordinary sites like UGHH, Fat Beats, MegaStore, etc. but none of these retail outlets carried the album although it was released yesterday. The reason is that the duo has decided to drop it on a Canadian label named 6.8.2. Records; an interesting thing is that the site mentions forthcoming albums by Grand Puba and even a new BDP album to drop on the label!

The album sounds nice for sure, unlike the two previous Kris collaboration LPs that both run about 35 minutes, his meeting with Bumpy Knuckles is closer to an hour of dope music. Lyrically they really compliment eachother well, they both got that "ruff ruff" voices that meshed so well with eachother on '92s "Sex & Violence". The themes of the 13 songs range from very socially politic content to traditional battle rhymes to the state of hip-hop and more, in other words it never gets boring - especially when you got veteran emcees of this caliber running the show and no guest apperances. Production sounds great too, we get the boom bap element we all love but with a little twist as there's plenty of live instrumentation on these songs like plenty of horns, heavy drum patterns and from what I gather it's actually Foxxx who partly plays both bass and guitar. For now you can support the artists by buying the album via iTunes.

HipHopDX just posted an informative inteview with Bumpy on the making of the album so if you're interested in how "Royalty Check" came to fruition make sure to check it out. Below is a little taste of the album that I uploaded, you can also scroll down a few posts to check out the lead single "Stand Up", produced by King Karnov.

KRS-ONE / BUMPY KNUCKLES - "STRESSED OUT"

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