Cypress Hill, III: Temples of Boom: Album Review

The core of the record is Muggs's sound design. The drums are loose and heavy rather than snappy, the bass moves slowly enough to feel like it is following you, and the samples and keys are arranged to leave air around the voices instead of crowding them. That restraint is what separates III from a lot of mid-nineties dark rap, which tended to confuse volume with dread. Here the dread comes from what is left out, which is a lesson plenty of later dark-rap producers took from this period, and the result is a mix that sounds colder and more claustrophobic the louder you play it.

The rapping is built to survive in that space. B-Real's pinched, nasal voice remains one of the most identifiable in the genre, and its thin, almost cartoonish edge becomes more unsettling against the slowed beats than it did on faster material. The group's habit of treating hooks as chants works especially well here because chants fit the ritual feel of the production. When a song such as "Throw Your Set in the Air" locks the voice into the groove, the record achieves the strange effect of sounding both menacing and relaxed, a haze with teeth.

The writing is the limiting factor. The topics are familiar: weed, paranoia, loyalty, enemies, and a good deal of score-settling with critics and rivals. Rap Pages noted at the time that some of it sounds like the Cypress template, and that is fair. The group repeat their central images, and the grudge material, especially the track that fed the Ice Cube feud, is more petty than revealing. A lyric that is specific enough to quote is rare here, and the album depends on tone more than on lines.

The guest slot is handled well. RZA and U-God appear on the one track RZA produced, and the result is the clearest bridge between the two coasts the record offers. The beat is grainier and more skeletal than Muggs's, and the group adjust to it without losing their identity, which is a harder trick than it sounds. That track also shows what the rest of the album lacks, which is a second sonic idea. Muggs finds one very good mood and sustains it for nearly an hour, and by the final third the mood has become a habit. An album of this ambition could have used one more abrupt change of texture to keep the dread from becoming wallpaper.

As a sequence, III opens with confidence and settles into a long, even middle. The first few songs set the terms quickly: heavy, narcotic, a little sinister, and unhurried. Once that tone is established the album rarely deviates from it, which gives the record unusual consistency and also leaves little to separate the fifth song from the tenth. The run from the middle onward is where the pacing flattens, because the tempo and temperature barely move.

The length is mostly earned. At around fifty-six minutes with fifteen tracks, it is long for a record with this much sonic sameness, but Muggs keeps individual songs between roughly three and five minutes, and the shorter pieces act as palate cleansers. A brief interlude-sized track near the end of the run provides the clearest reset, a short blast of strangeness that the album could have used more of. Without those breaks, the heavy mood would feel like a slog, and with them it feels like a descent.

The peaks come where the group allow a little aggression back into the tempo. "Killafornia" is the most obvious example, a compact piece that breaks the hypnotic slouch with something sharper and reminds you that these rappers could snap as well as drift. The sags are in the lower-key songs that rely on atmosphere without a strong hook, where the cool production does the work the writing should be doing.

The closer, a late addition listed after the main sequence, finishes on a looser, communal note and works as a release valve after all the paranoia. It is not a grand finale, and the album is better for not trying to be one. The sequencing is not flawless, since the middle could lose a song without anyone noticing, but it does a good job of building an environment and keeping the listener inside it.

III: Temples of Boom ranks just below the self-titled debut, which earns a 7.9 here, and that order is deliberate. The debut has more punch, tighter hooks and a clearer sense of surprise, while III trades some of that bite for atmosphere and a stronger sense of design. It is the better-sounding record and the slightly weaker collection of songs, and the scores reflect that split: elite production, good delivery, and writing that coasts on tone.

The album is for listeners who like their rap slow, dark and smoky, and for anyone interested in how mid-nineties West Coast rap found an alternative to G-funk. Fans of RZA-era Wu-Tang will find the crossover track rewarding, and anyone tracing the lineage of dread-laden, minor-key rap should treat this as a stop on the map. Skip it if you want lyrical density or story songs; the group does not offer them, and the album does not pretend to. If you have never heard Cypress Hill, the debut is a faster, friendlier entry point.

The record has aged well because its sound was never tied to a trend. The slow, hazy production still reads as distinctive thirty years on, and it sits more comfortably alongside current dark, atmospheric rap than many of its louder contemporaries. The grudge material has aged worse, as feuds tend to, but it occupies a small part of the running time.

Start with "Throw Your Set in the Air" for the signature sound, "Killafornia" for the sharpest moment, and "Illusions" for the mood at full depth. For what to hear next, go to Cypress Hill's second album, Black Sunday, to hear the group at its most commercially potent, or to the Wu-Tang Clan for the East Coast counterpart to this record's menace. The sentence that sums it up: a group famous for noise made its best argument by lowering the volume.