producers: paris zax

7. I Deliver

A small anecdote of my life: Last year (that means 2001), I was in LA. Obviously I couldn't stay out of record stores. And in one store I picked up a couple of CDs, but also asked the store keeper, what he'd suggest me getting. He immediately took out the Met Fly album and put it into the store system. So what did I hear? Well, first some Johnny Cash sample opening the "Hellow (High)" intro. But after that, holy cow: Some sirens, a low boom, and a hard fuckin' drum. So it didn't took me long to agree that I want this album, well, definitely not more than one minute and five seconds (that's how long the intro is). Because if someone is putting such a intro to his album, the rest can't possibly be bad.

Now as much as I remember I also heard the second track, that's called "Flow Central" and this has to be Met's signature tune. Once more a hard ass drum is accepting the center stage position. What then creates the right moment for us to mention the producer on this piece. His name is Paris Zax, and he did each and every cut on here. One of his biggest qualities must be that he's changing things up, like on "Flow Central" we are moving through several appearances, and if one moment sounds stagnant, than only because you ignore the details that Zax is adding all the time. Another thing we have to mention this early in the review is, that the tracks are with only a few exceptions very short. Out of the seventeen cuts, only five are longer than three minutes. And just as many are not even two minutes long. This could mean that the whole album sounds very chopped up with constantly moving from one thing into the next. But it could also mean, that there are several elements glued to each other, what has them appear as one big something. Now the latter is definitely the case here.

This however means that it's more difficult to point out the artistic highlights in the beat circus. But if we are still trying to identify them, then there is "Cypher Manifest", that has a bass rolling in the back and screaming sound effects haunting the track. Or there's "Doomsday", that is very chaotic in nature and a cut where Met must have followed the rhythm and the break ups and not the beat the progression of the lyrics. There's however also the playful "Snapzilla", where we get a jazzy sample, that has made it onto hip hop tracks before, and we also get the longest track on here: "Days Of Adolescence", where the vibe is very much defined by the melancholic and depressed sound background. "Lazy Days" is matching a complex drum with low kept sounds and a human humming chorus, while with "Goodbye (Fly)" we are sent bye-bye with a snapping progression.

On the lyrical tip, Met is very much dominated by his low voice, that is so low that he wouldn't even have to change up his voice to demand the best from your bass speakers. His flow is of a very speaking manner, that has the lines often enough be separated by a small break. And with the tracks being so short, the verses have to be just as short. Hence "Chip Off The Block" is a stop and go type happening, where we are always hitting the breaks at another red light, only shortly after we finally took off a the traffic light a few yards down the road. But when Met is talking he does what emcees do best: they boast, they tell anecdotes and they make sure that they often enough are nasty too. Like in the case of "I Deliver", he's portraying himself in the brightest braggadocios colors, while on "Lazy Days" he shares the mic with an unnamed fellow rhymer, and they both are chilling within purple clouds, remarking: "lazy days like these used to bother me / but now I line up emcees and start clabbering".

What then in total has this record sound very LA. Not only due to the circumstances why this album first attracted this reviewer's attention. But because of the gritty jazz funk, with the playful twist, that is mixing in a lot of different elements, making the total very different and very hard to characterize. Hence we shall use simple words to describe this, words like good, dope and awwwyeah.