Afro Samurai (Soundtrack from the TV Series)

From incidental music to stormy old-school throwdowns, Afro-Samurai covers a lot of ground in one hour. While it doesn’t have the cohesion of RZA’s classic productions for the Wu-Tang Clan, this score finds the producer further pushing the envelope of hip-hop sound design. The stealthy, nervous orchestras of the “Bazooka Fight” instrumentals and the skeletal sounds of “Afro’s Father Fight” and “Tears of a Samurai” are abstract pieces of background music that sound like haunted, shattered pieces of complete songs. “Oh,” “The Walk,” and “Baby” have just enough grime to save them from being facsimiles of Jodeci; if RZA decided to push the darker side of these r’n’b experiments, he could have a deeper sound for modern soul music. Elsewhere he reconfigures the sound of some golden age hip-hop heroes, and while the Q-Tip collaboration “Just a Lil Dude Who Dat Ovah There” gets bogged down in clumsy repetition, the Big Daddy Kane showcase “Cameo Afro” is a must-hear. For all its schizophrenic experiments, Afro-Samurai proves that RZA is still in possession of one of popular music’s thriving musical consciousnesses.