Just what the hell are Wu-Tang Clan these days anyway? A finishing school for loony-tunesters like ODB, Raekwon, Redman and Method Man? A clothing label/video game franchise? A hip-hop Freemasonry who’ve ceased to exist as a unit per se, but whose name and trademark represent a code of ethics by which the new breed must be measured?

The answer is, of course, all of the above and more. Clan records are as psychotropic an experience as any trip into Nighttown – this is rap Nosferatu: voices that at one second appeared to be coming from the far end of a ballroom suddenly whisper in your ear; blasts of soundtrack action blare at the most high-strung moments; mirrors deliver the wrong reflection.

When the Clan debuted in 1994, it was as if the subterranean hordes from Colum McCann’s work of fact-ion This Side Of Brightness had emerged from the abandoned subway tunnels and disused sewers under the Big Apple. This was a collective capable of redefining hip-hop in a swirl of Shaolin-Zen mystic millencholia and Nation of Islam apocalypse dogma. Apart from what was left of the Caribbean dub brotherhood, only Tricky and Cypress Hill had done as much to pervert the course of beat justice in armagideon time. 1997’s Wu Tang Forever further proved that Dr. Dre didn’t own the franchise on expanding (or rather inverting) rap’s event horizons.

In fact, in these very pages, Jonathan O’Brien best defined the difference between West and East Coast hip-hop by indicating that the LA variety conjures images of “customised cars cruising lazily through the suburbs of Southern California, sun beaming down, palm trees swaying in the gentle “breeze” while the NY strain suggests ìflashing sirens, stormy dark weather, looming tower blocks, yellow tape which reads ‘Police Line: Do Not Cross’.” That’s The Clan, in a nutshell.

Of course, The RZA is Wu’s mastermind, and while he did fine work scoring Jim Jarmusch’s existential rap assassin flick Ghost Dog earlier this year, he’s pretty much stuck to the blueprint on this third official group opus. While all about him are pursuing the heavy-hop hybrid with varying degrees of success (even Redman shows up in the latest Offspring clip), the RZA remains unphased, staring out from the back cover of The W like a homeboy mandarin, reinforcing but not refining his black arts – what cross-pollinations that do occur here mostly take the shape of reupholstered soul or blues jams, as in ‘Hollow Bones’ and the righteous ‘Can’t Go To Sleep’.

Wu 2000 are undoubtedly a more glasnostic ensemble than of yore, but they’re more likely to invite ghetto godfathers like Junior Reid (‘One Blood Under W’) and Isaac Hayes – or even mainstream surfers like Nas and Busta Rhymes – on board, rather than Fred Durst or Marshall Mathers.

Elsewhere, ‘Conditioner’ offers the rare chance to observe Ol’ Dirty Bastard and Snoop Doggy Dogg trading vastly contrasting rhyming styles; the former a hyperactive mad hatter, the latter a slit-eyed deadpanhandler.

The astonishingly poppy single ‘Gravel Pit’ aside, there’s nothing quite as cardiac-arresting as ‘Reunited’ or ‘For Heaven’s Sake’ here, but the Se7en Samurai shtick is still in full effect on titles such as ‘Do You Really (Thang, Thang’)’ and ‘Chamber Music’, all seemingly filtered through the aural gauze of a bankrobber’s stocking mask.

Cosmology, conspiracy theory, kung fu, numerology, sci-fi Zionism, hooch, weed . . . it’s business as usual in the 36 chambers. And business is good.