The Batlord

Dark Lotus: Tales From the Lotus Pod

Around the '00's the juggalo...thing was in full swing and Psychopathic was striking while the iron was hot and so we get Dark Lotus, a sort of supergroup made up of ICP, Twiztid, Blaze Ya Dead Homie, and some dude called Marz. Yay. Well, all my old juggalo friends seemed to love this thing, so here we go...




A friend gave me a burned copy of this album years ago, but it's too fucked up to listen to more than half the album so I'm only slightly familiar with this. This sounds about what I remember, not bad at all, but not brilliant either. The performances are perfectly entertaining, but nothing that you couldn't get off any of the member's normal albums, so this doesn't feel all that necessary. They generally stay away from the juggalo anthems, and go for a darker overall sound and tone than a lot of what was going on at the time, but this is all relative as there's really nothing on here that's particularly menacing.

The lyrics are what you'd expect from these groups, but unfortunately they're also what you'd expect from this time period: violent, but watered-down, weird(ish), but nothing to compare to ICP's or even Twiztid's old school material, quasi-religious, but overly-simplistic and eye-rollingly working class.

If you're a juggalo then this might be fantastic, but if you're not then this just comes off as dull and vanilla. This isn't so much a swing-and-a-miss as it is a perfectly good bunt. I'd bump this when I was on the tail end of an ICP binge, but by that time I'd be about ready to listen to something else anyway. So, in other words...meh.

P.S. Apparently Violent J didn't like Marz's contributions so he later remixed the album and replaced his verses with Anybody Killa, calling it now "definitive". Any album that is made "definitive" by the addition of Anybody Killa was probably a turd to begin with.

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