If
the title weren't already taken More Fish would be a fitting name for Ghostface's new
album, another tour de force from a guy who made history with his Wu-Tang
brethren while still in his early twenties and just keeps getting better with
age. But where the glorified mix-tape More Fish sounded like a collection
of outtakes and leftovers, The Big Doe Rehab feels like a worthy sequel
to last year's Fishscale. Consider it The Godfather Part II to Fishscale's revered crime epic.
The forever-agitated Ghostface once again thrusts
listeners straight into gritty, vivid crime world milieus with little in the
way of exposition. "Yolanda's House" plunges listeners deep into the tail end
of a night gone horribly awry as a panicked Ghost flees the cops and a drug
bust and solicits the help of a buck-naked and embarrassed Method Man before
Raekwon shows up seeking partners in crime. It's the album in miniature, a
giddy rush of novelistic detail (you can practically hear Ghost's ragged breath
and mocking laughter as Meth's asthmatic lover struggles to cover up following
Ghost's unexpected arrival), dark humor and tag-team storytelling in the
classic Wu-Tang vein.
Rehab packs the visceral, transgressive punch of the
best crime fiction but it's equally adept at old-school Sunday-in-the-park jams
(the infectious single "Celebrate") and wiggy conceptual tracks like "White
Linen Affair (The Toney Awards)," wherein Ghostface provides play-by-play for a
gala populated by a who's who of hip-hop and R&B luminaries (and,
apparently just for variety, Robin Leach and Meryl Streep). Along with Raekwon,
Ghostface has publicly come out against the direction of the new Wu-Tang album.
Here Ghost puts his talent where his million-dollar mouthpiece is, illustrating
by example exactly how a late-period Wu-Tang project should feel and sound.