Madlib channels a deep, intertwining lineage of Black music through Sound Ancestors like folklore oration, storytelling with the sorcery of a beatmaker who knows how to make an instrumental really sing.
Sound Ancestors is a realisation of what the Madlib and Hebden are capable of in tandem. It’s bold, different, and takes the genre of instrumental hip hop to the next level.
The wildly inventive rapper-producer teams up with electronic musician Four Tet to create an album that lives in the space between the past and the future.
Whilst there are less immediate areas of the tracklist, there is a good proportion of showstoppers and every track has its place in the overall effort. This is an LP that builds, getting better the longer it goes on.
Sound Ancestors isn’t anything new from Madlib, but it only further cements his status as one of the great producers, artists, and minds in hip-hop.
Nourishing batch of beat collages from the leftfield hip-hop auteur, assisted here by Kieran ‘Four Tet’ Hebden.
Sound Ancestors is a mixed bag if ever there was one. It's funky, it's psychedelic, it's jazzy, dirty, clean, and mean. It's Madlib.
Sound Ancestors trails off into averageness by Madlib standards, which is to say it never stops being above average in general.
It sounds recognizably like both Madlib and Four Tet while taking their music into directions where neither artist has ventured before, and its highlights are life-affirming.
Madlib is known for his psychedelic, positively weird concoctions, and he delivers a few on Sound Ancestors.