Samurai Champloo Music Record: Departure

Sold it. Found a copy of Masta at the same shop and traded up — couldn’t justify keeping both when I only ever put on Departure anyway. Figures.

Still the one I reach for first. Nujabes and Fat Jon don’t share a sonic language so much as a temperature — everything here runs at exactly the same warm, unhurried pace regardless of whether it’s swinging hard or barely moving. That’s harder to pull off than it sounds across two composers and a dozen tracks.

Coming back to this after a few years of distance — the RYM rating I left feels slightly low. “Battlecry” alone earns an extra point. There’s a gravitational pull to how Nujabes builds a loop that I don’t think I had the vocabulary to articulate before.