''Don't Mess with the Dragon'' is the fourth studio album by American rock band

Ozomatli Ozomatli is an American rock band, formed in 1995 in Los Angeles. They are known both for their vocal activist viewpoints and incorporating a wide array of musical styles – including salsa, jazz, funk, reggae, hip hop, and others. The group ...

. It was released on March 27, 2007, through

Concord Records Concord Records is an American record label owned by Concord and based in Los Angeles, California. Concord Records was launched in 1995 as an imprint designed to reach beyond the company's foundational Concord Jazz label. The label's artists ha ...

. Production was handled by the band themselves together with

KC Porter Karl Cameron Porter, known as ''K.C'' (born June 27, 1962), is an American record producer, singer-songwriter, arranger and composer, winner of six Grammy Awards and two Latin Grammy Awards. Porter has worked on more than 40 albums, including pro ...

. The album peaked at number 154 on the ''Billboard'' 200 albums chart in the United States.

Critical reception

''Don't Mess with the Dragon'' was met with generally favorable reviews from

music critics Music journalism (or music criticism) is media criticism and reporting about music topics, including popular music, classical music, and traditional music. Journalists began writing about music in the eighteenth century, providing commentary on ...

. At

Metacritic Metacritic is an American website that aggregates reviews of films, television shows, music albums, video games, and formerly books. For each product, the scores from each review are averaged (a weighted average). Metacritic was created ...

, which assigns a normalized rating out of 100 to reviews from mainstream publications, the album received an

average In colloquial, ordinary language, an average is a single number or value that best represents a set of data. The type of average taken as most typically representative of a list of numbers is the arithmetic mean the sum of the numbers divided by ...

score of 74, based on eight reviews. Lana Cooper of ''

PopMatters ''PopMatters'' is an international online magazine of cultural criticism that covers aspects of popular culture. ''PopMatters'' publishes reviews, interviews, and essays on cultural products and expressions in areas such as music, television, ...

'' wrote: "nearly everything about ''Don't Mess With the Dragon'' is as fluid and serpentine as the album's namesake". Natalie Nichols of ''

Los Angeles Times The ''Los Angeles Times'' is an American Newspaper#Daily, daily newspaper that began publishing in Los Angeles, California, in 1881. Based in the Greater Los Angeles city of El Segundo, California, El Segundo since 2018, it is the List of new ...

'' found that the band "makes its kitchen-sink musical fusion feel seamless in any given number... Still, "Dragon" can be dizzying in its sheer variety". In her mixed review for

AllMusic AllMusic (previously known as All-Music Guide and AMG) is an American online database, online music database. It catalogs more than three million album entries and 30 million tracks, as well as information on Musical artist, musicians and Mus ...

, Marisa Brown wrote: "it's not that any of these tracks are bad: Ozomatli is talented enough musicians, and have been doing it for long enough now, that they're able to pretty much successfully pull off anything they try, but these songs move so far from the sociopolitical salsa on which they created themselves that it's almost hard to recognize them as from the same band". Writing for ''

Spin Spin or spinning most often refers to: * Spin (physics) or particle spin, a fundamental property of elementary particles * Spin quantum number, a number which defines the value of a particle's spin * Spinning (textiles), the creation of yarn or thr ...

'', Mikael Wood stated: " heydownplay the

hip-hop Hip-hop or hip hop (originally disco rap) is a popular music genre that emerged in the early 1970s from the African-American community of New York City. The style is characterized by its synthesis of a wide range of musical techniques. Hi ...

boom-bap... in favor of busy pop jams that mirror the overstimulation of 21st-century life".

Track listing

Charts

References

External links

* {{Authority control 2007 albums Ozomatli albums Concord Records albums Albums produced by K. C. Porter