I've been waiting twenty-five years for a follow up to We Are The Streets so it was kind of embarrassing to discover that there was one and it came out nearly a decade ago. This sort of thing becomes unfortunately bewildering once you're past fifty.
Anyway, it's not like there's been a shortage of LOX material given all three of them having churned out a succession of mostly incredible solo albums, each one invariably featuring the other two, notably After Taxes and A Gangster and a Gentleman which are both up there with Streets to my ears; but there's a certain grisly magic you only get in full with the three of them on an equal footing - the only three-man group where all of 'em is the strongest, as it says on here. Fifteen years after the previous group effort, the favoured sound hasn't really changed so much as expanded with the times. We still have the familiar glacial New York beats, and the inevitably sterling contribution of DJ Premier, but there are a couple which border on trap, notably Secure the Bag featuring Gucci Mane, without quite going the full sweaty distance to sound like they turned up on the album by accident. Mostly the beats stay minimal, grooves more than tunes but expertly tooled so even the moody minimalism sounds cinematic on What Else You Need to Know and others; and the beats stay minimal because that's really all you need. Few rap groups have even one guy who can weave a saga with the level of detail you get on this album, and the LOX have three. You could strip it all down to acapella and it might lose some of the force but it would still kick your ass. This is one of those that taps right into the core of rap, and what rap has always been. It's not always pretty and yet it remains both majestic and magnificent from start to finish. It was worth the wait.
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