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Whatever happened to the real Cypress like the original, Temple of Boom and Black Sunday? Don't buy this album and save your money. Lets just hope something better comes along soon.


best cypress album yet   April 11, 2002
 3 out of 3 found this review helpful

Cypress Hill dropped their first record over 10 years ago, and the year is now 2002 and they are still making tight music. Stone Raiders is the best Hill record of them all; they have developed such a dope style over the years, and this is so apparent in the songs on this cd.

CH has always been about the hardcore style, and they have added the rock element to the mix in recent years. However, the production is still hip hop as is B Real's flow, and that to me is keeping it real but adding another phat element to the package. These guys just can't make a bad song.

The whole album flows from one track to the next...not something you can say about many groups out there. Usually 2 good songs and ther rest of the disc is garbage. Not so with Cypress Hill.

I love Southland Killers as well as the song with Red and Meth. Yo, go get this...


They need to lay off the green for a bit...   January 10, 2003
 3 out of 6 found this review helpful

Funny lads, Cypress Hill. History should remember them as a witty, original hip-hop act who became one of the first of their kind to attract a mass rock audience and, as a result, paved the way for the rap-metal revolution of the late '90s. With every slightly daft and boring record like 'Stoned Raiders' that they make, however, the memory of them as a genuinely innovative force dissipates. For all the threats and street testimonies, for all the samples of guns being loaded ('Southland Killers'), Cypress Hill sound curiously innocuous - weed-infatuated panto gangstas for primary school tough guys.

It's not that bad an album, of course: DJ Muggs remains far too canny and punchy a producer for that. The best tunes here are those which most closely resemble the Cypress sound Muggs patented a decade ago ('Psychodelic Vision') or - in the case of the closing 'Here Is Something You Can't Understand' - are remakes of old classics (1991's 'How I Could Just Kill A Man', specifically). Muggs also betrays a working knowledge of current trends in hip-hop: check the staccato riff of 'Amplified', a dead ringer for P Diddy's 'Bad Boy For Life'; or the plinking piano on 'Kronologik' that echoes Dr Dre's marvellous 'Still Dre'.

But 'Kronologik' showcases one of Cypress Hill's biggest problems - the increasingly tedious B-Real. Taking a break from his grey-haired gangsta cliches, he purports to tell the glorious history of the band, but it turns out to be a numbing litany of recording, touring, namedropping and dope-smoking repeated until he can brag about having sold 15 million albums. You do worry for these men, droning on about the old days like boring old soldiers, still convinced that cannabis is in some way 'dangerous'. Decriminalisation must be a constant horror for them.

Not as horrible, though, as the rap-metal that Cypress Hill persist in playing. Like 2000's 'Skull And Bones', 'Stoned Raiders' is liberally peppered with a kind of hamfisted rock that, belying their reputation as godfathers of the scene, actually appears to be derivative of Limp Bizkit et al. It'll sound fine live, as usual, when Cypress Hill turn up as token rappers on the European festival circuit yet again next summer. But really, only people too stoned to remember they already own Cypress Hill albums need this one.