Record Store Day Haul #1: Czarface - Czarmageddon LP

Silver Age (2022)

Every Wednesday, in honor of Ed Lover Dance Day from Yo! MTV Raps, I take a break from rock and roll to write a little bit about hip hop. In the late 80s and early 90s hip hop ruled my musical life. During this often called 'Golden Era' I discovered so much incredible music. As I am slowly replacing the CDs I've had for twenty-five plus years with vinyl copies, I'm going to talk about some albums that had a really important impact on me during some very formative years.

As I wrote about on Monday. I went to a new to me record store for Record Store Day this year.  I honestly didn't have high hopes that they would be stocking the records I needed, but I figured it would just be nice to get out of the house for an hour or two if nothing else.  Low and behold, they had both records I needed and the first one is the new Czarface album.

I fell into Czarface later than probably everybody, but I have been trying to make up for lost time.  Their new record is great, full of the sort of old school drum cracks and full, rich sounding samples that I find completely missing in modern hip hop.  Lyrically, Esoteric and Inspectah Deck dig into some deep nerdy cuts spinning tales and references about comic books, sci fi, pro wrestling and just about anything else that you probably had some passing interest in when you were a kid.  Combine that with the top notch production and you've got something pretty good going.

I can't say I really dig the track "Big Em Up," but aside from that there are eleven songs that fit right in with the sort of hip hop I want to listen to.  Especially when Kool Keith shows up on "Fearless & Inventive" talking about IG-88 and Dengar.  I'm not exactly sure how this Record Store Day version differs from anything else.  It comes with trading cards, but best I can tell any other version of the vinyl you can buy online also seems to have trading cards.  Maybe they'll just disappear on an eventual repress.

Czarface - Czarmageddon:
https://music.youtube.com/playlist?list=OLAK5uy_nPJN__S5byipo6ytTobJ331rnplBWp2UI