Cypress Hill: Skull & Bones : Music Reviews : Rolling Stone

Album Reviews

Cypress Hill's fifth album is a bipolar breakdown, wherein the group willfully splits into two distinct personas: an epic, melancholic hip-hop stadium band and a thrashing, metallic rock-rap hybrid that sometimes sounds more like Fugazi than Limp Bizkit. On the hip-hop tracks, B-Real deflates his notoriously nasal vocals by one or two degrees, Sen Dog blossoms as a boomy rapper in the tradition of Chuck D, and, most important, DJ Muggs refrigerates the band's sound with a gaggle of ominous symphonic riffs. "Highlife" is emblematic of the new sound: Unlike the hard, stalking beats of the Hill's earlier tunes, it blows and sweeps in like a cold front, complete with a worried-man bass line and a bleak melody. For the rock tracks, Cypress Hill indenture members of Fear Factory and Sen Dog's band, SX-10, and spit venom, from the anthemic hardcore of "Get Out of My Head" to the blue-steel surge of "Can't Get the Best of Me." It all makes sense: After all, Cypress Hill collaborated with Sonic Youth and, er, Pearl Jam on the 1993 soundtrack for Judgment Night well before Korn and P.O.D. made heaps of wampum out of the rock-rap hybrid. But Cypress Hill show 'em how it should be done, especially with the chugging, hook-filled "(Rock) Superstar." Skull and Bones proves hip-hop is more like T2 than Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde: Here, Cypress Hill seem capable of morphing into anyone they wanna be. (RS 840)

PAT BLASHILL