Album Review: Various Artists - The Man With The Iron Fists

Christmas comes early for hip hop's true believers. The sparkling soundtrack to The Man With The Iron Fists is part nunchucksploitation and part rap classic, swinging like a katana from Ghostface's beautiful nonsense to the seething march of Flatbush Zombies, and featuring an improbable cast of old masters and young blood.

The Black Keys dust down their BlakRoc personae for Baddest Man Alive, with verse and production from RZA and a video that sees Dan Auerbach fish-slapped by the Wu master. The Revelations' buttery version of William Bell's Stax classic I Forgot To Be Your Lover unleashes flair and familiarity. Your starter for ten – name the act who sampled that opening lick? Pusha T, Raekwon, Joell Ortiz and Danny Brown's Tick, Tock is colossal, Brown yelping flippant similes like a man who doesn't know that he's the next next big thing – “I'm a wet dream, dry sense of humour/Travel in class like a high school rumour”. This is what was missing from ...Cruel Summer. Greedy-eared listeners are spoilt with new cuts from Wu-Tang, Method Man and underrated sparring partner Streetlife, and Kanye himself.

As the companion piece to RZA's first film as leading man, it's ironic that the only thing missing is a touch of theatre. Nevertheless, The Man With The Iron Fists OST maintains a pace, quality, finesse and coherence which listeners have no right to expect from a soundtrack album, and with not so much as a chord from Rusty's 30 Odd Foot Of Grunts. Four ninja stars out of five.