CD - Time Machine: SLOW YOUR ROLL

It almost seems too soon  to be seriously asking: remember the  golden days of hip-hop? While rock-and-rollers look back 50 years to reminisce the glory days, you needn’t cast your mind back further than 20 to relive hip-hop’s heyday. It was an era of socially-conscious  and good-natured raps, and an era when Fiddy was still a couple of shells away from rising to fame.

To answer the question, Slow Your Roll is an album that most definitely does  remember the golden days. It’s definitely no coincidence that Time Machine are called Time Machine, with tracks on the album variously recalling the early-days sounds of De La Soul, Digital Underground, and People Under the Stairs. 

Slow Your Roll begins by jumping into the immediately playful “Time’s Fly”, and the jaunty pace continues for much of the album through highlights “Spelling Bee” and “Personal Ads”. The chilled instrumental “Water in Your Cereal” sets the pace for the latter section of the album, with the melancholy finale (“The Way Things Are”) probably Slow Your Roll’s most solid track.

If hip-hop’s been ruined for you by the never-ending slue of thugs in Lakers jerseys packing glocks, then it might be an idea to get onboard the Time Machine and go back to when, as the lyric goes in “Spelling Bee,” raps were pure and fun.