Chronicle & Jun Tzu - Exposure :The Documentary Mixtape.
Review By Stephen Harvey
I first encountered Chronicle early last year performing at the hip hop @ Fatcats night in Stoke on Trent after agreeing to make the short journey from Manchester courtesy of Forbidden Tongues who had asked him to come and play the night to promote his own album which featured Chronicle and artists from both Manchester and Stoke. The album received 3/5 in hip hop magazine and this was something of a coup for this particular night and the whole scene to be honest. Chronicle stepped up to microphone to deliverer his own particular style of hard hitting Manchester hip hop and the crowd of enthusiastic punters and artists were left awestruck with envy, and under no illusions they had seen something they would remember for a long time to come. I was, as you can imagine very honoured to be one of the select few artists and producers to get a sneak preview of the album before it goes on sale on the streets of Manchester and online via PayPal.
I have heard a lot of so called mixtapes in my time, and to be honest this one is like nothing I have ever heard before. I am in no doubt however that I will probably hear something very similar in the near future when others realise the power of the concept behind it. The Manchester scene is a lot different than that in Stoke, and I am no expert on the politics involved in some of the tracks, but the tracks between the conversations held my concentration throughout, head nodding and spinning tracks backwards to rewind and replay individual bars and lines that had me flabbergasted.
The album is scattered throughout with recorded phone messages and conversations relating to the scene in Manchester, and the whole culture revolving around the promotion and characters within it, but this isn't the appeal of the album.
Like I have explained in the previous paragraph, I am totally unaware of the majority of the content relating to the politics, but this did not take anything away from the tracks that are the real star of the album. The various conversations and sound bytes only served as a starter to the main course by adding atmosphere and wetting the appetite for what is to come. In this case it is the rawness of the hard hitting rhymes that take no prisoners and beats that portray the realness of life away from myspace.com and back to the streets where hip hop belongs.
The album bounces around genres and subjects seamlessly keeping you held in its clutches, and drawing you in to the darkness of the grime scene, This is a reality check of the scene in all its glory and pain, not the watered down version that you hear in mainstream music and should be seen as a template for the young artist attempting to climb to the top without the necessary skills to ascend to the summit.
The album should be on the CD rack of anyone who knows anything about hip hop, and to those who that think hip hop as a genre has nothing to say should listen in, and see what the UK has to offer the world.
The highlight of the album for me personally was the freestyle session tracks that came towards the finale. They brought back great memories of his appearance at Fatcats, where he had both me and the audience blinded like rabbits in the headlights of a car heading directly for road kill. This is how I felt after his performance on that night and again after hearing this album. It is a reality check on how good he is, and how hard it is to make even a small dent on the huge hip hop genre that he is very much a part of.
Hopefully Chronicle will rise above Manchester and make a huge impact on the hip hop world, but until then I can enjoy this album for a while, before it becomes a collectors item and I can say honestly I was there at the beginning.
The album can be ordered via PayPal
http://stokesounds.blogspot.com/2008/08/cd-review-chronicle-and-jun-tzu.html
http://www.myspace.com/chronicleflow