Record Review: La Coka Nostra-Masters of the Dark Arts

La Coka Nostra-Masters of the Dark Arts (Fat Beats)
By Nathan G. O'Brien on Scene Point Blank

Although LCN worked with a number of underground producers for this album, the selection of beats they chose work well alongside one another—most of them sinister, hard-knocking and ripe with cuts and crossfades—giving Masters of Dark Arts an interconnected texture.

La Coka Nostra’s pluperfect union of bombastic boom-bap, record scratching, and realism-based hardcore rhyming conjures up imagery of hip-hop before skinny jeans and hook-anchored club anthems took over the mainstream—those days when packs of thugs stood outside the corner store, in over-sized sweats and hooded parkas, smoking on Phillies Blunts and trading verses in the cypher, while Gang Starr instrumentals blasted from a nearby Jeep. Head-banging is absolutely required.

...Full length review can be found here.