Quakers – Quakers

At 41 tracks, Quakers is a behemoth of a record. It's hip-hop to the core: samples and crisp beats clashing violently beneath a roll call of emcees who run the gamut from well-known indie stars like Dead Prez, Prince Po, and the ubiquitous Akil of Jurassic 5 (all of whom are in fine lyrical fettle) to virtual unknowns like Coin Locker Kid.

Sonically, it's a perfect fit with Stones Throw, the label that championed Madlib and Dilla. The breaks contain solid funk, jazz, soul and orchestral sounds, but they are far from the obvious choices that lesser producers might have used: these are either dusted, rare breaks, found by dedicated vinyl-chasers, or they're sampled from live instrumentation. Either way, they are totally original. The tracks with synth-based breaks are even stronger, exuding a powerful, cinematic menace.

With beats by Fuzzface (aka Portishead's Geoff Barrow), 7-Stu-7 (Portishead's engineer), and Australian producer Katalyst, one might expect a disjointed outing, with the three producers and thirty-five emcees straining against each others' aesthetic sensibilities, but the opposite is true. Quakers has a remarkable coherence. Highlights: What Chew Want's brassy, minor-chord horn-stabs, with the loping, stoned flow of emcee Tone Tank; the space-age organ funk and chopped drums of Coin Op Kid's Russia With Love; the synth-powered swagger of Jobless and Dark City Lights, and all of the Quakers instrumentals.

This is solid, exciting, experimental hip-hop with an old-school soul. Destined to become a classic, it has the epic sweep of the old Quannum collaborations: a self-assured reliance on the core values and aesthetics of hip-hop, cheek by jowl with serious experimentation and boundary-pushing. Lyrically and musically, it's a triumph. Buy it on vinyl.