One of our favorite current producers L’Orange and Chicago-born, LA-living emcee Jeremiah Jae have a joint album, The Night Took Us In Like Family, due out on April 21st via Mello Music Group.
Consider it the alchemy of Madvillain and “The Maltese Falcon”: a five-part fable of tangled crimes, narrow escapes and raining lead. Beats bend sinister with imagery aiming for the temples. Jae invokes dark clouds, crowns of thorns and LSD eyes. Bars written in dirt. Samples are disembodied and ethereal. It’s like a grand jury indictment doubling as a Greek chorus. A song title like “Ice Obsidian” says it all. This is frozen lava, black and white celluloid, the spoils won by sinners. Watch your back rap.
Or maybe it’s the hip-hop version of the gangster flicks made before the Hays Code – raw and uncensored, deeply artful without pretension. Pitchfork once described Jae as: “a lot of people talk loud and say nothing; Jeremiah Jae finds strength in the inverse.” On “Night Took Us In Like Family,” he inhabits both eulogizer and executioner. He triumphantly looms over the corpses and explains how this all came to be. L’Orange supplies concrete requiems of dusted soul: beats to crack safes, soundtracks to stealth assassinations.
To kick things off, L’Orange and Jeremiah let loose the first single, “Taken By The Night.” Check the song and peep the tracklist for The Night Took Us In Like Family – featuring Homeboy Sandman and a rare appearance from Blackalicious front-man, Gift Of Gab – below.
01 Part One: Introducing A Conspicuous Man
02 Do My Best To Carry On
03 Ice Obsidian
04 Underworld
05 All I Need f. Gift of Gab
06 Part Two: God Complex
07 The Concrete Some Call Home
08 Ignore The Man To Your Right f. Homeboy Sandman
09 Taken By The Night
10 Part Three: The Damning
11 The Lineup
12 Kicking Glass
13 King of Like Life
14 Part Four: Revenge & Escape
15 I Was Invisible Nothing
16 Death Valley
17 Starry Eyed Balcony Walkers
18 Part Five: Macabre
RELATED: L’Orange – After The Flowers (FreEP)
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