Of my favorite producers — thanks to Homeboy Sandman — L’Orange and Jeremiah Jae are releasing a joint album, The Night Took Us In Like Family, via Mello Music Group.
Consider it the alchemy of Madvillain and “The Maltese Falcon”: a five-part fable of tangled crimes, narrow escapes and raining lead. Beats bend sinister with imagery aiming for the temples. Jae invokes dark clouds, crowns of thorns and LSD eyes. Bars written in dirt. Samples are disembodied and ethereal. It’s like a grand jury indictment doubling as a Greek chorus. A song title like “Ice Obsidian” says it all. This is frozen lava, black and white celluloid, the spoils won by sinners. Watch your back rap.
Or maybe it’s the hip-hop version of the gangster flicks made before the Hays Code – raw and uncensored, deeply artful without pretension. Pitchfork once described Jae as: “a lot of people talk loud and say nothing; Jeremiah Jae finds strength in the inverse.” On “Night Took Us In Like Family,” he inhabits both eulogizer and executioner. He triumphantly looms over the corpses and explains how this all came to be. L’Orange supplies concrete requiems of dusted soul: beats to crack safes, soundtracks to stealth assassinations.
With that date quickly approaching, L’Orange and Jeremiah Jae decide to release the project’s first single, “Taken By The Night.”
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