Esham – Judgement Day Vol. 2 – Night (1992)

May 8, 2023

I tend to see Judgement Day as one whole album, as a modern listener that’s how it’s presented to us on streaming services, so its hard to appreciate the split between the two records. I’d love to get some of this wicked shit on CD but the prices are just absurd, even for the remasters that happened recently.

Anyway, part 2, “night”, is choc full of fucking amazing rap tunes. The opening track is awesome, even if the sampling of Sabbath’s “War Pigs” is a bit clumsy. The hat-trick of “Play Dead”, “13 Ways” and “Finger In The Cake Mix” is just beyond words, the latter track being one of Esham’s many rude odes to gettin’ funky with it, so to speak, and I will never look at cake mix in the same way, ever again.

ICP fans should take note of track 9 “Wake The Dead” in particular, a lot of the elements here are re-used in the groups excellent Hell’s Pit. In fact, there are many, many references that ICP take from both Judgement Day discs and work into Hell’s Pit (including the concept of The Witch, as well as too many little bits of rhymes to mention). If you’re a huge fan of Hell’s Pit you’ll love going through both Judgement Day records picking out all the little bits that ICP “borrowed”. I mean, even the “day” and “night” two parts of this record echo the two parts of The Wraith, although I gotta be honest with you about Esham, both “night” and “day” are equally as dark and twisted lol. (Maybe Judgement Day has been retroactively worked into the Joker’s Card universe? when The Wraith comes for ya, then it’s Judgement Day, and then it’s off to Shangri-La or Hell’s Pit with your ass haha)

The only song that really just stands out as ridiculous is “Living In Incest” which has just… well, I want to say it hasn’t aged well but to be honest he probably should have left this one on the cutting room floor to start with.

If you like self-produced, self-released, sick underground rap, then you really need to get up into some of these early Esham records.