Take one listen to the Quincy Jones soul loops on "Krazy World" or the indelible Motown strings backing Hassan Chop on "I Wonder" and I think you'll agree. Kutmasta Kurt and Madlib aside, I haven't heard anyone lace a track like Doom. "Krazy World" finds him delivering couplets at a cross-country runner's pace like Jack Kerouac with a dutchie in his back pocket: "Check it, playin' em/ Bungle them chumps till I abolish 'em/ Been doin' it since double-oh-one with five dollars/ We be sparklin' in a Siegfried shirt/ With wide collars." Just as Prince Paul pulled quite a crew together for A Prince Among Thieves, MF has enlisted some strong soldiers here, heads that don't find his expansive vinyl universe intimidating. Gigan takes the prize for delivery, though. "Next Level" throws another curveball, eschewing Doom's taste in bizarre source material with a sultry, piano-laced jazz groove that hearkens back to early 90s fixtures A Tribe Called Quest and The Pharcyde, complimented by lyrics from Lil Sci ("I got a gift called/ Hip-hop prophecy/ 2003/ The year of the jiggy emcee"), Stahhr and ID 4 Winds that bring a smooth Black Star flavor to the proceedings. In a rare moment of introspection, Hassan Chop does some ruminating on past mistakes and lost friends in "I Wonder", and it's to his credit that the song is affecting without tripping headlong into melodramatic cliché. Kurious (billed here as Biolante) sets the bar high on "Fastlane" with an unflappable and confident delivery that fits in amazingly well with the squealing guitar riff that forms the track's hook. Even without Doom's verbal skills, the roster here lives up to Metal Fingers standards, with nary a wack emcee in sight (compare that to a record like Peanut Butter Wolf's My Vinyl Weighs a Ton, which featured a few lightweights in the pack). Fantastik's GZA-by-way-of Humpty Hump delivery and a sleazy, greasy blues guitar, Doom pushes "Anti-Matter" straight to the top of the heap. Only two tracks feature Doom rhyming, but at least one of them is an album highlight: Along with Mr. The King Geedorah project, unlike Doom's recent outing as Viktor Vaughn, finds MF almost exclusively behind the boards, comfortable with rocking the SP1200 and letting others turn out the mic. "Monster Zero" is the epicenter of that approach, a cut-n-paste narration of Geedorah's arrival on planet Earth via visitors from the future, backed by a languid soul loop and distorted, bizarrely syncopated snares the monster in question- a mutated, irradiated, three-headed fucker who once terrorized the inhabitants of Planet X- is namechecked and invoked throughout Take Me to Your Leader, and a few of the guest emcees hide behind the monikers of other Godzilla friends and foes to cement the theme.
Using the same lo-fi, direct-from-the-VCR dubbing he used to narrate the rise and fall of the iron-faced ruler of Latveria on Doomsday, MF lies out the mythos of King Geedorah over the course of Take Me to Your Leader, drafting an outline of the rubbery behemoth's exploits (it doesn't quite qualify as a concept album), then uses it as a guide to piece together some of the most jaw-droppingly, neck-twistingly, brain-meltingly inspired cuts this side of Q-Bert's Wave Twisters. First step is to smoke trees, and catch up on your monster movies.
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