Album of the Day: X-Clan - Return from Mecca

I have to confess, while I like X-Clan, so far nothing I've listened to has been able to hold a candle to 'Seeds of Evolution' by Dark Sun Riders, so I'm coming into this with somewhat tempered expectations. However, as long as Brother J is involved, you can't really go wrong. He immediately makes his presence felt with the lyric-heavy 'Aragorn' (“stay stem cell music/mass production of clones”). As always, the album is littered with militant samples and beats that range from mediocre to mindblowing. Wikipedia calls them “afrocentric,” and I think that's about as apt a description as I can think of. Both the lyrics and the beat of 'Why U Doin That' scream of regret and lament, both of the world we live in and the one we have failed to create for ourselves. The whole thing, much like 'Mainstream Outlawz,' which came out two years later than this one, feels like it it would fit right in in 1994, though I haven't decided whether or not that's a good thing. I love the old school beats and lyrics heavily influenced by their views of their own culture, and it's certainly better than a lot of stuff I've heard recently, but there's something fundamentally different between this and, say, anything Talib Kweli has done in the last five years or so. I think KRS-One's guest spot in 'Speak the Truth' exemplifies this perfectly. Perhaps it's because I've spent a lot of time with industrial or sample-based beats, so the old school turntable-and-drum-machine beats sound almost foreign to me. This theme is completely thrown off-kilter with the club beat used in 'Positrons,' which just feels out of place here. That said, there are very few artists I can name off the top of my head who can so easily balance head-bobbing superficial sounds with conscious themes and lyrics (look no further than 'Prison,' a heavy track about consequences that can last across generations, or 'Locomotion' “to unify cultures/liberate your mind/rebuild our foundation/one track at a time”). 'Space People' reminds me so much of Blackalicious that I kept waiting for Gift of Gab to jump in and start rhyming. There's an interesting mix of old and new in 'Trump Card,' which features an old school beat with newer-feeling lyrics. The album ends with 'Culture United' a reggae-influenced track featuring Damian Marley abou thte need to embrace and promote one's culture, and 'Respect,' an absolutely powerful track bemoaning the treatment of citizens (“yet I'm treated like a convict/I'm not a terrorist, all I want is respect”). It's such a good feeling when you can play an album and get nothing but good beats and good rhymes. Pure hip hop, nothing less.