http://www.discogs.com/Spectre-Retrospectre/release/1376805
Retrospectre is not the greatest hits collection its title anticipates, but rather, a collection of obscure Spectre releases culled from compilations and b-sides, with three previously unreleased tracks. That alone could be a recipe for disaster (cf. Public Enemy’s Greatest Misses) but for the fact that the dark hip-hop instrumentalist lord personally picked these sixteen tracks from his musty vault. In terms of accessibility in the hip-hop instrumental game, Spectre makes DJ Shadow sound like The Neptunes and RJD2 like Timbaland, and that’s intended as no insult to either artist. It’s just that, ten years and five full-lengths into his career, Spectre has always made dark, bass-heavy music designed to fuck with even the most experimental head’s mind state. And Retrospectre is plenty effective at that, so yes, it’s an excellent Spectre compilation.
There’s no one sound that defines a Spectre production, other than the thumping of your own heart. Sometimes he uses live instrumentation to keep his tracks loose, like on the appropriately titled “Whirling”. Sometimes a familiar sample is thrown into the bitches’ brew simply to confound expectation: the “Come on!” memorably used in Black Sheep’s “The Choice Is Yours” might burst out of “Kros Is And Always Will Be,” but no one will be doing the Roger Rabbit to this. At other times, Spectre is just working in another dimension entirely: “The Sound,” a collage of martial drumming and slowed-down, trippy vocals taken from an interview with Method Man, is wholly unclassifiable but somehow catchy. (In the way the soundtrack from a Hitchcock film is catchy, that is.)
Five songs featuring a plethora of underground emcees—most prominently the off-beat, off-rhyme, off-the-planet flow of Sensational—don’t disrupt the claustrophobia of the record, and on tracks like “Psychotic Episodes” featuring Sensational, Mr. Dead and a charged-up God Albino, the fear factor only rises. However, Spectre does let a few unnecessary tracks into the mix—“Trash N’ Ready” and “Beats Within” come to mind—excessive not because they aren’t effective, but because they aren’t especially unique. And it’s only in the excess that Retrospectre reminds you it is a compilation rather than a new Spectre album, because this grimy collection really does have a consistency lacking in most. Hip-hop needs mad scientists like Spectre more now than ever as it gains in the dangerous light substance known as popular acceptance. May we see aRetrospectre Vol. 2 in another ten years.
