Step Sixty Eight: Czarface: Every Hero Needs a Villain.

Hey my readers!  This week's step on Map of Shaolin is the sophomore release by Czarface (Inspectah Deck with Esoteric and 7L), Every Hero Needs a Villain.  However, when I got my early copy of it in the mail, I sought to cover it as fully as possible to give you the best idea of the entire record before it came out.  I feel it would be pretty shitty of me to try to write a whole new blog rehashing everything I said, so instead I'm going to re-link you to my in-depth look at the album.  Obviously I could've just done this for every album on the Shaolin Annex (Wu albums that have come out while building The Map), but with the others I simply wanted to give a quick review.  Since I got Every Hero Needs a Villain close to a week before its release, I really wanted to dive in and give a bit back to everyone who's been kind enough to read the blog over the last 16 months.

So check that link for my track-by-track impressions on Every Hero Needs a Villain.  It's still a really solid album and definitely more rock-oriented than the first Czarface record.  Fascinating and crazy shit to be sure.  Inspectah Deck's career, much like Ghostface Killah's, has found a new borderline-geeky niche to explore, and I mean that in the best way possible.  It's so cool to me to see their careers evolve in the last 22 years, especially to arrive at such different destinations than Uncontrolled Substance and Ironman, respectively.  Both those albums are fantastic; I just respect the artists' evolution along the way.  Cheers!