Snake Hollywood – My Condolences (2012)

Artist: Snake Hollywood

Album: My Condolences

Source: Artist

Tracklisting:

1. Warning Shot (Intro)
2. My Condolences
3. Thug Eulogy
4. iBang (ft. AbSoul)
5. Rollin (ft. George Wilson)
6. Return Of The King
7. Grindin’
8. Thug Eulogy (Finale)

Note:

Snake Hollywood’s first single sat in my inbox for a while gathering hard drive dust.  I had never heard of him previously and I thought he was probably more of the same ol’ same but I couldn’t have been more wrong.  Snake Hollywood truly delivers one of the most compelling releases of 2012 .  Why is it compelling?  Well, the first thing that makes it so is that the artist is putting himself into every verse of every track.  He can be described as intense, There is no filler material.  There is no fluff.  It’s all vastly personal.  The second thing that I love about this EP is how he incorporates religious elements into his lines.  He does this in such a way that it mingles Biblical concepts with the street code.

With the aforementioned being said, I will pit the first two tracks of this album against any other that was released this year.   If you love hip hop you will undoubtedly be able to get down with and perhaps even be astonished with the quality of the rhythms and the rhymes but lets focus on those rhymes.  Snake Hollywood’s voice is rugged, intense, yet clear and concise.  His intelligence is also on display on this EP.  He is not going to dumb it down for the listener,…the listener is going to elevate.

Let’s take the title track for instance:  My Condolences starts off with a piano riff and some electronica but when the drums hit, all bets are off. Snake Hollywood is charged with assassinating every bar.  And chorus, what chorus?  Who needs a chorus?  He goes for just under four minutes with little in  oxygen and high on breath control.  His most impressive lyrical salvo comes at the very end:

…My Condolences, pushing pain through a mother’s syringe / Oh I was shamelessly covered in sin / My excuse was  no role models to guide me / But on occasion a rose grows off the concrete / And for my failures my teammates resent me /  So I pray to say to Ulysses, you ni&%as forgive me / Sincerely, it’s the resurrected don with the nuclear flow / 65 megaton bomb , rap little storm brew / Gradually you / Goons going to get at you fools / It’s the Exodus /  The blood soaked ink from the peasants on the pages of the Necromonicon Testament…

Now that’s just from the crust of the man’s medula.  There’s so much more that he has in store as the album progresses.

Thug Eulogy is a haunting song straight from the corner of the hood.  Snake Hollywood narrates how the hood mentality does in it’s citizens.  It’s sounds dreadful and despairing but in a way people just refer to the fact that this is the way it always has been and always will be.    The production really fits the topic and the mood, almost feeling like a choir from Heaven calling down to the earth.

Snake Hollywood is a Brooklynite but he is not resigned to the same old tired beats that get recycled around the block.  He actually flows over production that utilizes a lot more synthesizer than other NYC artists and that may be more to his benefit.

On certain tracks (Return Of The King), Snake Hollywood’s flow  reminds me a little  of Pharaoh Monch.  He has the complex wordplay and the cadence that  is reminiscent of Monch from his Organized Konfusion days. The horns on this track blaze on while Hollywood lets us know that “this ain’t the same old, this an act of war”.

It takes a lot to put me on my musical heels, but in listening to My Condolences I was taken a back.   Snake Hollywood has two feet in the streets but strikes me  as as a visionary. He sees things vastly different than his contemporaries and that mentality sticks with me throughout listening to the album.   There is a spiritual element to the man who knows and understands vices, but has risen to a higher level of understanding.