Album Of The Week: Wu-Tang Clan A Better Tomorrow

The problem with the new Wu-Tang Clan album A Better Tomorrow is that it's not the last Wu-Tang Clan album. The last time the whole group came together, it was on 2008's 8 Diagrams, a messy psychedelic boom-bap splooge that fully indulged RZA's wandering acid-samurai sensibility. It was glorious. More than The W or The Pretty Toney Album or No Said Date or the instrumental version of the Ghost Dog soundtrack, 8 Diagrams stands as the great lost Wu-Tang masterpiece. It's dark and woozy and all-over-the-place. There's no center, but there are so many magical moments: the breathless Ghostface Killah supermarket-fight narrative, the drowning spaghetti-western whistles, the transformative "Stick My For My Riches" appearance from middle-aged soul journeyman Gerald Alston. 8 Diagrams got no respect when it came out -- least of all from the group themselves. Raekwon gave interviews disparaging RZA as a "hip-hop hippie" and shitting on the album's head-blown tone. When the crew toured shortly after its release, they didn't do any 8 Diagrams songs, and they didn't invite RZA to come with them. It took years for that rift to heal, and RZA had to publicly beg and scold and cajole until holdouts like Raekwon agreed to come back into the fold to make A Better Tomorrow. The end result: A relatively clean old-head comfort-food rap album. It's fine, and it's good enough to get Album Of The Week during one of those slow end-of-the-year weeks. But from a group who can put together a work of gorgeous lunacy like 8 Diagrams even in their post-relevance dotage, it can only be a disappointment.