Peanut Butter Wolf

The Best of Peanut Butter Wolf is a slightly premature release -- the turntable master, despite having released singles for over a decade, had only made one previous full-length album, 1999's My Vinyl Weighs a Ton, and a good chunk of that album is reprised here, occasionally remixed and even retitled -- but it's a solid overview of the skills of one of the best DJs in underground hip-hop. If anything, the album focuses too much on his work with various MCs (most notably My Vinyl Weighs a Ton's Rasco, who appears on half a dozen tracks) and not enough on the wiggy breakbeats and cerebral crosscutting that are Peanut Butter Wolf's true strengths. It's wild cutting contests like the nine-minute "Tale of Five Cities" and the self-explanatory "Styles, Crews, Flows, Beats" that really shine, but the album as a whole, with its brief inter-track examples of Peanut Butter Wolf's turntable skills, is a fine introduction. [A Japanese version added a bonus track.] ~ Stewart Mason, All Music Guide