Dredknotz - Under Pressure 4xLP

90s Tapes (2025)

Every Wednesday, in honor of Ed Lover Dance Day from Yo! MTV Raps, I take a break from rock and roll to write a little bit about hip hop. In the late 80s and early 90s hip hop ruled my musical life. During this often called 'Golden Era' I discovered so much incredible music. As I am slowly replacing the CDs I've had for thirty plus years with vinyl copies, I'm going to talk about some albums that had a really important impact on me during some very formative years.

Dredknotz were a group that were active in the mid 90s.  Helped along by DJ Richie Rich of 3rd Bass fame, the tracks that comprise Under Pressure have been done and waiting for a release since 1995.  It wasn't until 2025 that they finally saw the light of day, courtesy of my favorite reissue label, 90s Tapes.

1995 is usually that line in the sand for me, it's where hip hop started to move in a direction that wasn't what I wanted out of it.  But as I've mentioned many, many times in the past, I have constantly found exceptions to this rule the more I dig around and I'd include Dredknotz in that list.  Under Pressure is built on the back of some dark, upright bass loops, blaring horn accents, alongside of plentiful kick and snare drum rumbling. It gives the album a post-Enta Da Stage Boot Camp Clik sort of feel when it comes to the production.  

Sometimes I wish the tracks were a bit faster, as slower tempos are kind of the bane of hip hop released after 1994 for me, but Dredknotz keep the energy level up with a lively, dynamic lyrical delivery.  While not to the same extreme as Onyx, there are times where Dredknotz remind me of a slower, moodier version of those kings of Queens.  The end result is an album that harshly rumbles along, never getting too wild, but also never slowing down to the point where I lose interest.

90s Tapes did another fantastic job with this reissue, from how great it sounds, down to the the smallest details of the art.  Not being a DJ and only being a person who likes to listen to records, the release being a quadruple LP to include all of the instrumentals is probably a bit more than I need personally.  Though I imagine there are plenty of folks significantly more talented than me that wouldn't have it any other way.  

Dredknotz - Under Pressure:

https://90stapes.bandcamp.com/album/under-pressure

Lord Finesse - Return of the Funky Man 2xLP - Tan & Black Splatter Vinyl

Get On Down / Giant (2025, Reissue)

Every Wednesday, in honor of Ed Lover Dance Day from Yo! MTV Raps, I take a break from rock and roll to write a little bit about hip hop. In the late 80s and early 90s hip hop ruled my musical life. During this often called 'Golden Era' I discovered so much incredible music. As I am slowly replacing the CDs I've had for thirty plus years with vinyl copies, I'm going to talk about some albums that had a really important impact on me during some very formative years.

For me, 1992 is the miracle year of hip hop.  While it's not the year that most of my favorite records came out, I think it's the best and most consistent year of hip hop before the golden era started showing signs of cracking.  It built off of 1991 and took things, particularly from a production standpoint, to higher levels.  Innovation was careening forward weekly with new releases that explored new ground in a genre that was making sure the world knew was here to stay.

Return of the Funky Man is Lord Finesse's 2nd full length, though he's lost DJ Mike Smooth since his 1990 release.  Also by this time the Diggin' In The Crates crew (or DITC, for short) saw their notoriety rising as Diamond D and Showbiz & AG were making noise.  Despite all of that, Lord Finesse flew under my radar when I was buying records in 1992.  I don't remember seeing Finesse on Yo! and I guess what The Source had written about him wasn't enough to make me hunt down anything by him at the time.  Part of that is tragic, because this is exactly the sort of thing I was listening to at the time and I should have had decades to grow with this record.  But on the plus side, I was able to discover a true classic many years later and hear the exact kind of hip hop production I love in the mid 2010s.

And it is the production that really makes this record soar for me.  There's enough of that late 80s and early 90s fast tempo drums, with those eclectic samples and bass lines that were starting to assert themselves by this point.  There isn't a stinker in the bunch as every song is funkier than the one before.  On the mic, Finesse has a voice that did take me a little time to get used to.  It's a little higher pitched and nasally, but not in an over the top B-Real sort of way.  Just in a way that didn't grab me immediately and required a few listens to have his lyrics sink in. Once they did sink in, it became easy to see why he's so respected all these years later.

While I cannot say that this splatter colored vinyl is aesthetically the most pleasing record I have ever seen, I am gratefully to have a nice double LP reissue of this as even the 2005 and 2014 reissues had become quite scarce over the years,  If he originally flew under your radar like he did mine, it's probably time to give Lord Finesse a listen, and this is a great place to start.

Lord Finesse - Return of the Funky Man:

https://music.youtube.com/watch?v=e9kJNgcTmCM

Superdrag - Last Call For Vitriol LP - Red Vinyl

 

Superdrag Sound Laboratories (2025 (Reissue)

I have been a fan of Superdrag from the first time I heard "Sucked Out."  When it came out in 1996, I wasn't really the sort of person that would listen to the radio or watch MTV.  In fact, I'm pretty certain that I've never seen the video for that song even to this day.  But I was writing for my college newspaper in 1996 and Regretfully Yours was sent to the office for review.  I took it as something of a guilty pleasure as I knew the band was getting popular in the buzz bin section of the world, but to me it was just an excellent pop record.  That sort of fleeting fame comes and goes pretty quickly, but Superdrag remained consistent, pumping out strong records for the next few years.

Last Call For Vitriol is the fourth album of that initial run.  They did eventually do a fifth in 2009, but to be honest, I've not heard it.  Last Call came out in 2002 on Arena Rock records.  I remember it vividly because I was interning at my eventual music industry job and I stuffed about 400 of them into envelopes to send out to college radio.  I'll be honest, while I did like it, I wasn't blown away at the time.  

As the years have gone by (way too many years, if you ask me) my appreciation for the band's entire catalog has grown and Last Call For Vitriol has come along for that ride.  That said, there's still some misses on here for me.  I still don't really love the garage-y swagger of "I Can't Wait" or the alterna-rock of "The Staggering Genius" or the 'hey-is-this-a-Fountains-of-Wayne-ballad' of "Safe & Warm."  But when the band is in full on pop mode like they are on "Baby Goes To 11," "So Insincere" and "Remain Yer Strange" it's impossible to not love Superdrag.

While I would still probably rank Last Call For Vitriol as the weakest of the four main Superdag records, that doesn't make it a weak album.  There are half a dozen killer songs on here and even the ones I mentioned above aren't bad at all, they're just not at the level of the pop madness the band is capable of.  More than anything, I'm just really happy this is finally on vinyl so I can complete my run of Superdrag full lengths.

Superdrag - Last Call For Vitriol:

https://music.youtube.com/playlist?list=OLAK5uy_kDHh0b7uaGtMOxDrd4sgNVGSYatPCNtIo

Sham & The Professor - Split Personalities LP

Freeze / Priority (1994)

Every Wednesday, in honor of Ed Lover Dance Day from Yo! MTV Raps, I take a break from rock and roll to write a little bit about hip hop. In the late 80s and early 90s hip hop ruled my musical life. During this often called 'Golden Era' I discovered so much incredible music. As I am slowly replacing the CDs I've had for thirty plus years with vinyl copies, I'm going to talk about some albums that had a really important impact on me during some very formative years.

I wish I knew a little more about Sham & The Professor.  There's very little information about them that I'm able to find on ye olde internet, though that isn't exactly surprising as the actual informational content on the internet has been vanishing over the years.  That's a completely different, and very depressing, topic.  But all I can really find about this early 90s hip hop group is their list of releases on Discogs.

Split Personalities is the debut Sham & The Professor full length album though there were a bunch of single released leading up to and shortly thereafter its 1994 release date.  There's also a follow up that came out in 2001, but I haven't delved into that one just yet.  I don't even remember exactly how I stumbled across this album.  It may have been from those recommendations that show up at the bottom of Discogs listings, but I'm not positive.  However I found it, I'm sure glad I did as it's a great album.

1994 is that transitional year in hip hop for me.  While there's lots of great records, there's also quite a few that are moving in a direction that I don't care for.  On the production side, Sham & The Professor sit right where I want a record to be.  This is bass heavy, thick production with pounding drums and the sort of samples that take control of my neck, rendering me incapable of not nodding my head along in approval.  There's also some nice fast beats, as one of my biggest peeves about mid 90s hip hop is how slow it is.  

Lyrically, both Sham and The Professor can hold their own.  They complement each other and pass the mic back and forth with ease, reminding me of how seamlessly groups like EPMD are able to do it.  The content is serious, though they are certainly able to battle and do so on occasion.  The way that they fold their flows into the beats is super impressive and it leaves me scratching my head about how these guys slipped through the cracks for me for so many years.

It took me a minute to find a nice copy of the LP at a reasonable price, and mine was sealed before I popped it open.  The only complaint I have about any of this is that Split Personalities is one of those 90s hip hop records where the vinyl is a single LP and because of that there's not as many songs on it as there are on the CD version.  So we only have 11 of the 17 tracks on the vinyl, which bums me out.  Especially egregious is "Murder on My Hands" being missing from the vinyl.  That's a killer song.  Maybe someday one of those great reissue labels like 90s Tapes will do a fancy rerelease of this, but for now I'm just happy to have the record period.

Sham & The Professor - Split Personalities:

https://music.youtube.com/playlist?list=OLAK5uy_kMXJzZEopn4aGKs1Qwud-PeyjqYXV5qTo

Swami John Reis - Turn On You 7" (/250)

 
Swami (2026)

Swami John Reis kicks off his 2026 with a 7" of two new songs.  If I remember the listing on the Swami shop page correctly, I think these were from the same sessions that produced the last full length.  Though I am not positive about that as the page for this on the site is now gone, likely because the 250 copies of this record that were pressed disappeared pretty quickly.

On the A side we have "Turn On You."  This one is a medium tempo chugger with lots of good downstroking in the verse.  But the guitar really shines through said chugging as it has a bright tone with just a hint of jangle. We blast into the expectedly big chorus that also has some nice keyboard flourishes.  It's a fun one.

"Meme Bitch" holds down the B side and is much faster with perhaps double the downstrokes per minute. It kicks off with a relatively straightforward verse with a chord progression that feels very Swami, even though it probably would seem unusual for many songwriters.  I, however, am not a songwriter, so I probably don't know the technical name for this part of a song, but there's a bridge/transition/breakdown thing right before the before the chorus that has a a strong Hot Snakes feel to me, but without the big crunch of guitars that is synonymous with that band.  RIt's great.  The chorus is a cathartic shout along and The whole shebang wraps up pretty quick. 

The Swami can do no wrong by me and this 7" is just another excellent record to add to the collection.  I feel like the amount of new Swami music is definitely on the uptick these last couple of years and I hope that continues to be the case.  I always want more.