My Gut Reaction: Adrian Younge and Ghostface Killah - Twelve Reasons To Die II (July 10, 2015)

Two years ago, Ghostface Killah teamed up with producer-slash-composer Adrian Younge to deliver Twelve Reasons To Die, an homage to 1960's Italian giallo flicks with an overly-violent storyline and the music to match.  Ghost starred as the lead, who was double-crossed and murdered by the Deluca crime family, but whose ashes were pressed up into twelve vinyl records, and also he somehow comes back to life to take out his enemies.  Hey, I never said the story made any goddamn sense.  But the fact of the matter is that it was entertaining as shit: Ghost and his team (made up of other Wu-Tang Clan members and also Killarmy's Killa Sin) stuck to their scripts and delivered a fantastic, critically-acclaimed concept album that actually told a coherent, if improbable, story, one that lent itself so easily to another medium that a comic book series was also commissioned.  

It was inevitable that a sequel would follow, is what I'm saying.

My Gut Reaction: Ghostface Killah and Adrian Younge - Twelve Reasons To Die (April 16, 2013)

Ghostface Killah is one of the nine original members of the Staten Island-born Wu-Tang Clan, and has slowly but surely become the most consistently entertaining member of the crew, which is no small feat when compared with the natural charisma of Method Man, the lyrical genius of, um, The Genius, the musical wizardry of The RZA, or the batshit-craziness of the batshit-crazy Ol' Dirty Bastard (R.I.P.)  Adrian Younge is a music producer and composer who specializes in, as his Wikipedia page refers to it, "psychedelic soul", who has worked with the Philadelphia-born R&B group The Delfonics and handled the soundtrack to the (fucking awesome) film Black Dynamite.

Put them together, and you get yet another reason for Ghostface Killah to not yet release a proper follow-up to Apollo Kids, his Def Jam swan song.