The Mind The Wax label’s services to hip-hop go up another notch with the release of West Coast rapper Destruct’s The Best You Never Heard LP. And if you think that album title is an idle boast before you’ve listened to it, a quick check of who the man has worked with should give you cause for pause since the list includes emcees of the calibre of Smif-N-Wessun’s General Steele, Copywrite, Planet Asia, Reef The Lost Cauze, Sean Price and Blu and producers including Jake One and Kev Brown. Turns out the set assembled here was never originally intended as an album and, in truth, the work included spans more than ten years with half the tracks having been previously released as singles or on comps. The other half however is new and of equal quality, as you’ll discover from your first listen.
That’ll be fourteen slices of true school boom-bap then from Destruct’s two-minute solo intro Genuine Approach on which he sums up his M.O., to the doomy sparseness of Lethal featuring EQ and Planet Asia. In between, it’s a solid roll call of quality emceeing and classy beats. The aforementioned Lethal is probably the monkey’s favourite cut on the LP recalling the sort of material knocked out on the Non-Phixion LP way back in the early noughties but keep your ears peeled too for the rock guitar-powered Three For Twenty-Nine featuring Sean Price & Johnny, the chilled funkiness of End Of Dayz feat. Mic Bles and stoner anthem Smoking Veterans featuring General Steele of Smif N Wessun with it’s cumbia-influenced beat.
(Out now on Mind The Wax)