Rod Liddle Rod Liddle

Cypress Hill: Elephants on Acid

A true bravura offering from these supposedly tired old men full of confidence and knowing nods to Jefferson Airplane

issue 20 October 2018

Grade: A+

Easily album title of the year, maybe album of the year. A true bravura offering from these supposedly tired old men. Cypress Hill are now in comfortable middle age, almost as old as me, ffs. But they were ever ludicrously inventive and idiosyncratic, right back to that first album in 1991, which wrote the template for many lesser and even more profane hip hop gods.

This one is mired in psychedelia, as even Charles Moore might have guessed from the title. There are very knowing nods to, especially, early Jefferson Airplane — although the guitar sounds more like Barry Melton than Jorma Kaukonen — and Sly and the Dead and Moby Grape. So it’s kinda like the Isley Bros great 1971 album Givin’ It Back, in which a clever and undoubtedly woke soul band covered cool left-wing whitey rock of that rather loveable age, which is no bad thing.

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