Swollen Members

“The most important lesson in life is to make sure you love what you do,” says a sincere Madchild, who supplies half of the rhymes for the incomparable Swollen Members, Canada’s best-selling urban group of all time. Swollen’s latest LP, Black Magic, is Exhibit A in the case that Madchild, Prevail and Rob the Viking love what they do. Fuel-injected with passion and laser-focused, the triumphant return of Swollen is guaranteed to simultaneously rock parties and stimulate minds.
When Vancouver’s multi-Juno-winning Swollen Members toured with Ghostface Killah in Colorado last February, the energy in the upper-level club was palpable from the moment the needle dropped. “People were jumping to every song that we were playing,” says DJ/producer Rob the Viking. “They were jumping so much that, by the fifth song of our set, they cracked four beams in the floor and they had to evacuate the club that was downstairs, and ultimately evacuate the whole building and shut the club down. So we actually did bring the house down that night.”
While the Members’ previous effort, 2003’s Heavy, was aimed squarely at the pop charts, the rejuvenated trio’s 20-track opus, Black Magic, is a focused, brilliantly diverse, set of mature hip-hop that only years of touring and studio sessions could produce. The LP’s thumping beats are spiked with classical overtones, and its carefully written, life-soaked raps will appeal to the veteran crew’s original fan base. In short, Black Magic will bring down the house.
The first video features production by Evidence (Dilated Peoples) “Put Me On,” and features Everlast on the chorus reflecting on lost love over a painful piano riff. “Brothers” details the group’s internal trials and triumphs. And “Too Hot” is a funky, rollercoaster, street track, guaranteed to nod heads from coast to coast.
“Something that we’ve always tried to do is experiment, and we really did that on our last project [Heavy], but we went in a direction that made us want to come back to our original style,” says emcee Prevail. Thus, Black Magic picks up where the gloomy, thick boom-bap of Balance and Bad Dreams left off. “On this album, we came back out the gates real hungry and real fierce.”
With the amicable departure of hook specialist Moka Only, who has left the Members to pursue a solo career but still lends his unique flavour to one Black Magic track, “Grind”, Madchild says the group took a time-out after two and a half years of touring to decompress. The consensus was, they shouldn’t make art for business reasons.
“There’s a lot more to life than just getting ready to go to the club and sipping champagne and picking up girls and going in your hot tub. It’s nice to have girls in your hot tub, don’t get me wrong, and it’s nice to have nice things, but there is more to life than that,” says Madchild, who was inducted into hip-hop’s world-famous Rock Steady Crew as an upstart rapper. “We took a long time making this album, a couple of years, and paid attention to detail and really found ourselves again.” Prevail agrees, explaining that after stepping back to reflect for a couple years, the group has stormed the studio with renewed vigor, working their asses off to deliver quality, heartfelt music. The passion pulsating through Black Magic is proof that a short break from the limelight can pay off big in the long run. “I think you gotta be able to do that to grow,” Prevail explains, “which is what this album really represents.”
Rob the Viking, who got his start as an in-house producer for the Swollen’s Battle Axe stable of artists and is now an official Member, says the group can’t live and die by hit singles. They have to enjoy creating and have to stand by each verse, every snare hit. Rob’s heart lies in the beat. “Rob is a musical genius,” Prevail says. “And he’s developing a greater ear.” That ear enables Rob’s compositions to shine on an album with guest production from such stars as the Alchemist, Evidence (Dilated Peoples), and DJ Kemo.
On “Prisoner of Doom,” for example, the Viking programmed a drumbeat overtop a simple synth sampled from a classical record. He then brought in session players—a cello player, violinist, pianist, and an opera singer—to flesh out the track for a classical vibe. “I always wanted to make music,” Rob says. “I started playing piano when I was seven years old and have been writing music ever since. I never really learned to read the notes as well as I learned how to make up things and play things that were in my head.”
In the heads of Madchild and Prevail swirl lightning strikes, chainsaws, black hearts and a pit bull that’ll rip your face off. Developing with a shared admiration for mid-’90s West Coast lyricists like Souls of Mischief and Freestyle Fellowship, the two emcees display a dark chemistry that is seldom found in rap groups today. And they do more than hold their own on blazing collaborations with A-list heads Planet Asia and Phil Da Agony (the lyrical slaughterhouse that is “Swamp Water”), tourmate Ghostface Killah (the throat-tearing “Weight”), and Everlast (the catchy, bittersweet single/video “Put Me On”).
“Everybody gave 110%,” Madchild says of the rewind-worthy guest appearances, all of which sprung from mutual respect and friendships struck with fellow hip-hop talents. “[Thinking] back to when we started the group, I realized I drew from pain a lot to get my substance, to go in the direction I was going musically. And that’s what I did again, because there’s no shortage of that in life,” says the reclusive Madchild, who was touched by the stirring cameo Dilated Peoples’ Evidence turned in for Black Magic. “Unfortunately, Evidence lost his mother, and that was what his rhyme was about in ‘Dark Clouds.’ So that’s a special thing to have on our record, what he was going through, and I was talking about a depressing time that I was in.”
Depression seems a thing of the past for Swollen Members. Swollen Members are currently in the studio with the Dust Brothers working on their new album “BEAUTIFUL DEATH MACHINE”. Expect to hear songs leaking from the studio this spring.