New Music: Backburner - The Posse Cuts

 

 

When it comes to a vast pool of lyrical talent, superb musicianship, daring weirdness and of course incredibly charming nerdiness, nothing comes close to Canadian super-group Backburner. The taproot from which so many great Canadian acts have flourished, this crew is undoubtedly a staple of underground hip hop and a personal favorite of both myself and Trylemma. A new Backburner album is a thing to be celebrated, and that's why when this quadruple cassette release of all three (official) Backburner albums since Heatwave PLUS a brand new collection of official crew posse cuts compiled and collected for the first time in a single, dope ass tape was first offered I didn't have to think too damn hard.

It helps of course that we have three all new songs featuring the likes of Jorun Bombay and Bleubird. But all in all it's damn cool to be able to collect these tracks and put them in the place they truly belong, considering there's stuff here that predates Heatwave.

As for the new material? "Summer of SARS 2" (the original also appears on the cassette and was a posse cut on an early Thesis Sahib album. Was SARS actually a big deal in Canada? Been a long time since I heard that song) featuring Jayo Smooth is a fantastic track with a great beat and really reminds me again how good Jesse Dangerously is. The Bleubird feature "Us Vs. Them (Them Being You)" was alright, maybe needs a repeat listen as it sounds very demoish to me. And of course Jorun kills it on the cuts for "We All Do". So they're all pretty dope and I'll just say I love the VHS throwback look of this collection. The artwork is also very cool for The Posse Cuts cassette itself and I think the uniqueness of this idea makes owning it worth it. We are talking a true living fossil here because some day these'll be worth a lot of money. To a relatively small group of collectors but whatever.

So go ahead and purchase this Trilogy Cassette collection right about here and make your other nerdcore fan friends hella jealous!

And, I really have to address this. For those of you who aren't living in the US you may not be familiar with the recent tragedy that occurred at an elementary school in Uvalde, Texas. An 18 year old kid of sound (but truly fucked up) mind decided to gun down 19 children and 2 teachers. The husband of one of these teachers died a few days later, literally of a broken heart. I want to address this here because we have a worldwide platform at UGF and as an American I feel a sense of shame and a desire to explain our country. America likes to portray itself as an example to the rest of the world, but the fact is we can't decide whether we'd rather protect children or play with guns. We can't guarantee most of our society that if they get sick their children won't go bankrupt paying off their debts when they die. We elect morons to high offices despite very credible complaints that they rape children (and no I'm not talking about QAnon idiocy). Hopefully we can do something to ensure this doesn't happen again but the fact is I just don't have any faith anymore. But if you live somewhere with sensible gun laws on the books and you're struggling to understand what the fuck is wrong with us, I'm with you there... Thanks for reading.