Well, it’s that time of year again: The air is thick with a potent smoke, and those involved in certain activities aren’t rubbing their bloodshot eyes because of a ridiculously high pollen count. To further commemorate today’s unofficial holiday — known as 4/20 — Cypress Hill, rap’s de facto gods of marijuana, have arrived like Santa Claus with Rise Up, a hefty gift bag of new jingles. But the album’s reception won’t be all brownies and milk.
Cypress Hill members have gone well out of their way on Rise Up to sing the praises of their favorite plant, and regardless of the quality of what they say they’ve been smoking, the quality of the record is definitely mediocre.
Cypress Hill is widely recognized as the first Latino group to go platinum in the United States, but this accolade is no longer that relevant: The band has not released an album with true chart success in about 10 years. But Cypress Hill is still remembered and revered for classic singles such as “How I Could Just Kill a Man” and “Insane in the Brain.” Unfortunately, Rise Up, the group’s first LP in six years, doesn’t contain any songs as noteworthy as Cypress Hill’s earlier material.
It seems as if the band members’ nonstop blunt cruising has burnt them out, leading to a brand new record of lukewarm ramblings. “Get It Anyway” is a great example of the decidedly stiff, uninteresting songs that make up most of the first quarter of Rise Up. At best, vocalists Louis Freese and Senen Reyes, otherwise known as B-Real and Sen Dog, are just throwing out unoriginal and overused words that fulfill hip-hop stereotypes. The track’s cliché lyrics include “This is for my real life/ Represent/ Been down since the first day/ Gangstas, hustlers, grinding out around the way.”
When the LP transitions from this cheap excursion to pump-up tracks, the band reveals its ability to craft some very catchy, interesting beats. Even with the relative absence of resident Cypress Hill producer DJ Muggs, who only assisted in the production of two songs on the album, the record is still filled with wonderful instrumentals. “Pass the Dutch” is infectious, featuring the group’s first real sing-along chorus on the album.
The blatant reinforcement of the subject matter in “Pass the Dutch” is a bit unnecessary, as the group repeats, “Pass the joint on the left hand side/ Only on the left hand side,” and then, “You’ll never get it on the right/ You can bet it on your life/ It’s 4/20 every night/ Who’d wanna get high?” The seeming inability to discuss anything else is irritating, as the band finds more and more ridiculous reasons to rap about its one true love, Mary Jane. Tracks such as “K.U.S.H.” and “Light It Up” also don’t leave much to the imagination.
Take the album’s title track, which starts with a sample of a news reporter who seems to have been covering the 1992 Los Angeles riots. Listeners may believe they are about to be treated to a powerful rap about a grave social injustice, but instead, they are hit in the face with what may well become the pot-smoking community’s anthem to legalize marijuana.
The marijuana theme is evident on a number of skits as well, a few of which feature Richard “Cheech” Marin and Tommy Chong. The skits are hidden before various tracks, along with funny samples involving, of course, people shouting about marijuana.
Cypress Hill does mix things up, but more so musically than lyrically. Many songs delve stylistically into rock, which is familiar territory for Cypress Hill. These rock tracks effectively use the band’s longtime live drummer, Eric Bobo.
Guitarist Tom Morello shreds on two of the album’s cuts. Morello throws down layer upon layer of highly processed guitar lines, which come out sounding exactly like his work with his rap-rock-defining band Rage Against the Machine.
Cypress Hill also employs guitarist Daron Malakian on “Trouble Seeker,” which in turn sounds almost identical to late recordings by Malakian’s now on-hiatus band System of a Down, with the inclusion weed-centric rhymes.
Not only does Cypress Hill borrow directly from the creative minds of current rock gods, but the band also looks to late-1960s rock bands for musical ideas. Last song and second single “Armada Latina” samples the classic Crosby, Stills and Nash song “Suite: Judy Blue Eyes,” but adds some Latin-flavored percussion and Spanish vocals to the track, putting the original in a very different light.
Less successful is “Take My Pain,” which features Irish-American rapper and former House of Pain member Everlast. The song’s chorus openly copies The Doors’ seminal “Break On Through” lyrics, sounding more like thievery than ingenuity.
Still, production choices are never really the problem on Rise Up. But Sen Dog and B-Real’s wordplay almost never reaches beyond the bong, leaving each artist to sound like the only thing he possibly could: a dope.
Today, this album may be hilarious to a lot of people, but tomorrow this album will probably mean nothing to most. While the hip-hop beats on the LP are great and intriguing, they can’t continually hold up the lyrically one-track minds of B-Real and Sen Dog. Rise Up is equivalent to a Christmas record that’s listenable merely one time a year, except the smoke the band alludes to isn’t from a fireplace.
diversions@umdbk.com
RATING: 2.5 stars out of 5
