LITTLE HAS gone right for the Wu-Tang Clan over the past couple of years. They collaborated with Texas on one of the worst singles of the Nineties, their Wu-Wear clothing line is by all accounts going down the tubes, and they’ve been whacking out an increasingly lazy standard of product. Apart from producer/mainman The Rza’s Hits (entirely made up of old material), there hasn’t been a worthwhile release from the Wu stable since Wu-Tang Forever appeared in summer ‘97.

A good time, then, for Gary “Genius/Gza” Grice to release the best rap album of the year. Beneath The Surface is startlingly good, possessed of genuine vision and clarity of purpose, and thankfully lacking the tiresome boorishness which spoils so many otherwise impressive rap releases.

Curiously, The Rza, who has produced virtually every track with a Wu logo on it since 1993, only lends his talents to one cut here; the song in question, ‘111’, is a rather perfunctory effort, sounding as though it was dashed off in a spare half-hour (which it might well have been).

Instead, the production duties are shared between interesting-sounding gents such as Inspektah Deck, Arabian Knight and Amon Ra. This changing of the guard serves to freshen up the sound hugely – Rza’s formula of splicing together horror themes and off-key piano was getting too predictable in any case.

Genius’ own raps mainly stick to morally ambiguous ghetto parables, with little of the unforgiving Nation of Islam rhetoric that disfigured his last album, 1995’s Liquid Swords. You don’t listen so much to what he’s actually enunciating as to the timbre of his voice, the flow of his words, the textures and vividness of his imagery.

On the astonishing title track, a snippet of an old soul hit is morphed and pulverised into a billowing, gleaming slab of sound, as a female vocalist coils herself around a bewitching chorus line. Before that, opening track ‘Amplified Sample’ serves notice with loud, bludgeoning blasts of brass and synth, welded to the familiarly rickety metallic beats.

The other two truly outstanding tracks are ‘Breaker Breaker’, which uses a police APB signal as its vocal motif to a backdrop of piercing, spear-like strings, and ‘Hip Hop Fury’, a tumbling shower of gleaming little droplets of glossy piano. The rest of the album, though not as powerful, is as impressive as anything else I’ve heard all year.