German Lugers starts off with a bang. “Heads Ar Tails” featuring Chief Kamachi, Virtuoso and Jus Allah starts off with a cascading sped up soul sample in to menacing piano keys and Chief Kamachi’s raspy voice. Kamachi, as always, kills it with dark rants of “angels with dirty wings” and Virtuoso follows with menace in his voice reppin’ the Bean to the fullest. As well as the track is going, it quickly disintegrates into mediocrity with Jus Allah’s recycled verses. Can we get some new lyrics from this guy? The next track “Who What When Where” is dope, but has also been previously released on Majik Most’s album. Celph and Majik both murder the track, but give us something new. “Never” with Reef the Lost Cauze follows and Reef does what he always does, rip the track to shreds. Again Reef proves why he is one of the hungriest cats in the game with lyrics like “stop getting ya words tangledfuck around and just get ya whole earth mangledyou be the first strangledi’ll come to ya show,beat you down and then kill it at ya merch table”. Reef is definitely a problem.

   The next joint up featuring Sean Price, Jus Allah and Doujah Raze is one of the strongest posse cuts this album contains. “Gunz” is an ode to all situations surrounding, you guessed it, guns. Sean Price murders his sixteen and stays true to his mantra of letting his knuckle game do the speaking, Jus Allah kills it with a sixteen from the viewpoint of a burner and Doujah follows up nicely with a lesson in lyrical dexterity. Combing those verses with a menacing beat with nice vocal cuts and you got yourself a sure fire banger.

   Unfortunately here is when the album starts to falter. A decent track from Wise Intelligent, but the beat falters greatly, especially when compared to its predecessors. Mediocre joints from West Coast vets living Legends and MED fail to get the listener involved, or even to create a necessity to bob your head. The tracks just seem to fall short and don’t exactly match up the emcees spit game. For instance take Born Unique. One of the nicest coming out of Bad News VA, is served up a faltering track that just doesn’t compare well to the cadence and overall ruggedness of the Unique one.

   Although German Lugers has moments of promise, their combination of too many emcees and faltering tracks leaves a lot to be desired. Unfortunately this Luger falls a few bullets short, but gives you just enough to desire to wait for the next product. Let’s hope the next one packs a bigger punch.

People looking for a CD with as much personality and zeal that Tony Toca brings to his underground tapes will be disappointed.  Though Tony Toca is both very skillful on the DJ and mic tip,  neither areas are at that high caliber on The Last Of The Pro Ricans.  Tony Touch uses a few tracks from the likes of Fat Joe and Big Pun in an apparent attempt to bring together Puerto Rican MC’s, but the reasoning for the rest of the tracks are anyone’s guess (even Last Of The Pro Rican’s standout material, Gang Starr’s “Natural” and Pacewon’s “You Know Its Like That” are not incorporated in any special way). Also, one of the most dissapoiting facets is that there’s only one exclusive track, “G’z Up” where Toca and Doo Wop, deliver an incredibly tedious two-syllable chorus (think Cam’ron’s “Hey Ma”). Toca’s verses on the stale “Capicu” and “Prendelo” don’t come close to the spanglish rhymes he kicked on his own album, The Piece Maker. His scratching remains skillful and precise, but he’s not really doing anything aside from trying to spice up what is at times uninteresting material.

Liberation isn’t quite a fitting title for this project, as the album is trapped within the confines of its own ideals. Trying to blend hip-hop, R&B, soul, jazz, and pseudo-spiritual romanticism might sound like a good idea to some, but it ends up as a slow, convoluted mess. Tre uses the same leisurely, jazzy beat again and again in slightly different forms throughout most of the album, and given the incessantly unpoetic lyrics it makes for an exhausting seventy-minute experience.

Though Tre tries to make himself into a rising phoenix, he ends up sounding, well, burned out. Dropping such Hallmark caliber messages as “Life Is Love” and “No Shame To Be You,” only sounds like it should be meaningful. At several points during the album, his lyrics go from merely mediocre to completely nonsensical. “Four Minutes and Counting”, is an odd six minute odyssey which begins with Tre saying “Remembering all there is is / love and all I am is all that I am.” Even when he’s trying to be deep, he ends up mixing his metaphors, spitting “I was walking through hell’s kitchen / picture malnutrition / starving for attention.” What the fuck? It seems as if he doesn’t know what he’s saying even though he keeps saying the same thing over and over!

Liberation is fortunately spiced with a few credible guest artists (but ask Made Men, guests don’t mean shit). Saul Williams, Charli 2na, and MC Lyte all provide their own relief from Tre’s constant blend of singing and rapping. Saul Williams lends an affectionate poem to the end of “Playing House” but it’s at the very end of the song, as if the listener is purposefully made to sit through Tre’s trite tenderness. Chali 2na steps in on one of the more up-tempo hip-hop style tracks to give some much-needed vocal variety on “Follow I’ll Lead”, where it becomes increasingly obvious who is following who. Chali’s voice is as deep as his lyrics, and the dual contrast makes for Liberation’s most interesting song. MC Lyte comes with consistent, if not quite memorable, lyrics.

Despite being lyrically and conceptually flat, Liberation at its best is pleasantly smooth material. The beats are alright, and Tre’s newly unclenched voice blends in so smoothly, it takes attention away from the lyrics. It’s not as if hip-hop doesn’t need more spiritual or introspective artists. Pharcyde’s work as a group might have been more than a bit absurd, but at least it was original. On that note, it’s also not just that Pharcyde was great, but Tre showed a lot of potential with them. Who can forget the honest documentation on “Otha Fish”, or his contributions to the classic “Passing Me By”? As far from Pharcyde as he can get, Tre’s strained solo effort is repetitive, unoriginal, boring, and worst of all, repetitive. Blah.

    Paul Barman’s constant clowning is centered around seventh-grade subject matter, namely anything that comes into or out of the human body (or both, again and again). Biz Markie’s “Pickin Boogers” has got nothing on “Burping and Farting”, where he comprehends the various ramifications of “ingestin’ gas in the intestine” all over a sped-up tango beat. The song is giddily devoid of any semblance of maturity, but that’s what makes it fun: he refuses to front. While braggart rappers are bragging about all their hoes in different area codes, Barman is having self-consciously ridiculous fantasies about fucking an assortment of celebrities. On the lead single, “Cock Mobster”, he rhymes their names with how he’d like to take them (example: “Winona Ryder / goin’ inside her!”), over a cartoonish yet bumping beat.

    While most rap is built on street smarts, MC Paul Barman uses a quirky brand of silly intellectualism. This fool makes references to algebra, Origami, and Nietzsche interspersed with boneheaded puns. His mischievous rhyme schemes round out his bizarre style very nicely, like when he claims that he “follows politics to ball all the chicks.” At one point, he gives the following shout outs: “Eve, Mika, RZA, Evil JD, / Nasir is Osiris and J-Live, AZ, / Rakim, Cormega, Cage, Mr. O.C.”. This may sound like an eclectic group of influences, nothing special, but it’s made up of  palindromes. That’s right, spell it all backwards and it’s the same thing, and it still rhymes.

    Even though his rhymes are genius, the Caucasoid (as he calls himself) does have an distinct lack of rhythm, even for a white guy. He gets so carried away in fitting all his ideas in that he doesn’t seem to care whether he falls on the beat at all. It sounds pretty awkward at first, but once the listener picks out all the punch lines it becomes rather amusing. His convoluted style actually works better on some songs than straightforward delivery would; like in “Anarchist Bookstore Pt. 1″ where he voices a stoned pornographer, a corporate hack, and an iron masked revolutionary, all with their own unique cadences.

Even though Barman’s new material is well worth the three-year wait since his debut, Paullelujah has a few defects which keep it from being a consistent piece. First of all,  the production isn’t nearly as innovative as when he was with the legendary Prince Paul (although they reunite on “Bleeding Brain”). Also, there are two tracks, “Time Travelling” and “A Somewhat New Medium,”  apparently trying to parody bad spoken word, complete with overdrawn pauses and corny background music. It’s cool to listen to once or twice, but it frankly could have been left out. That being said, this is the funniest album to come out since Chris Rock’s Bigger and Blacker (if that even counts), and is sophisticated enough to remain entertaining after repeated listening. Maybe Paul’s not going to be in the lyricist hall of fame, but he certainly deserves to sneak in and defiantly spraypaint “My dandy voice makes the most anti-choice granny’s panties moist” on the wall.

Perfect Imperfections is definitely the most deliciously defiant Hip-Hop album of the year. Cee-Lo manages to be ahead of his time using old styles of music. Gospel, Funk, Jazz, even a bit of Country are thrown in the mix. “Country Love” builds a banjo and harmonica solo (maybe the first in Hip-Hop since “Rosa Parks”) over a funk bass, but somehow it all makes sense. Heavy bass and horns are a recurrent theme, which gives the songs the bounce of Hip-Hop and the swing of, well, Swing.

As for the lyrics, there are some compelling complexities. Cee-Lo can write a scorching soul-searcher, an uplifting spiritual piece, and he can write a song about freakin’. The album’s furiously flamboyant “Closet Freak” actually reveals more about Cee-Lo’s work than you might think. Cee-Lo is silliness with substance, or maybe the other way around.. . His music is serious, but it’s also fun. You can grind to it, and you can think about it. The wonderful thing is that he doesn’t wait for a new song, or even a new verse to switch attitudes. On “Closet Freak” he goes far beyond Hip-Hop, and then snaps back into its faults with minimal whiplash in just one couplet. Those who pay attention to lyrics (bonus points for printing them in the jacket) will be stunned by “when people haven’t been where you been and they say you’re still going too far / or when you with your girl and pull over and f-k somethin’ in the back of the car. . . I’m a freak!” A nice thing is that those who don’t pay attention can still feel the attitude of the song in the beat and delivery. It’s effective on every level.

For all its perfect imperfections, the album does have its imperfect perfections (or something like that). Cee-Lo faces a similar challenge that Q-Tip did with his solo joint, Amplified. Both of their voices are, shall we say, unique, and this sounds great among the sounds of a crew, but the novelty tends to wear off . Lo’s raspy gurgle sounds distinctive, but it loses its appeal two thirds of the way through the album. This could have been easily remedied with a few more guests to break up the static. It’s clear he’s making a statement, but 16 bars from any member of Dungeon Family would push the limits of sublime subliminal saliency. Overall, the album sounds like a circus looks. There’s far too much excitement going on to pay attention to any one thing, so the best thing to do is just sit back and enjoy the glittering chaos.
 

While many question sampling, especially loop-based sampling, as a legitimate art form, PUTS manages to sample with true artistry. They use records like painters use colors, strategically blending and dabbing sounds in certain places instead of just playing part of a record over and over. They’ve taken the original Hip-Hop style of using drum breaks and elevated it to a new level, the result of which is a warmly melodic soundscape. Although they’re dubbed “old school,” PUTS, isn’t some sort of retro novelty; they fit in today’s Hip-Hop environment as a refreshing antithesis to everything wrong with Hip-Hop and an embodiment of everything right that was and could be. Nowhere is the advantages of their old-school charm more evident than on “Hang Loose”, complete with references to Dr. J and “party people.”

The title OST (Original Sound Track) conveys perfectly what PUTS’ music is. There’s no movie to see, it’s just a soundtrack to the lives of Thes One and Double K. These two MCs/Producers/B-Boys are true fans of Hip-Hop before they’re artists, and the music they make is what they would like to hear. There’s no subliminal, emotional, or commercial message, they just rap about their everyday life of blunts, drinking and records, not exaggerating or dumbing it down at all. The two-part “The Suite For Beaver Part 1″ talks first about an unlucky day and the therapy music can provide, which satisfies that same purpose for the listener. As much of a dramatic effect that telling vivid stories of violence has, you truly have to respect an artist who says “when I die don’t cry / just put my records in a coffin / and bury next to a very big tree with my MPC” (“The Dig”).

Overall, the album is quite simply the best chill-out record that’s come out recently. The bass is hypnotic throughout, the drums are deliciously smooth, and there isn’t any one track of less quality than the others. The more up-tempo songs like “Outrage, The” and “O.S.T. (Original Soundtrack)” blend very well with the serenity of “Empty Bottles Of Water” and “Acid Raindrops”. It’s something you could just put on and relax to all the way through. The rhymes aren’t all that incredible, but they are far from weak, just less effective than the other elements that are going on. As much ground as they’re breaking with their beats, they just don’t have lyricism on the same plane. However, the thing that makes PUTS unique is that they control their own music at every level, understanding that too many guest artists or influences might ruin the continuity of a very solid, high quality LP.

The most breathtaking aspect of Atmosphere’s music is how Slug’s lyrics are emotionally honest and factually vague. What he doesn’t say is much more important than what he does say. The strength of his subtext shows Slug’s excellent artistic sensibilities. Refrains like “everyone in his life / would mistake it as love” (in the middle of the gut-wrenching “Fuck You Lucy”) are spoken with such visceral power that the listener understands the feelings but not the situation, evoking strong curiosity. This mystery keeps the album interesting to the enraptured listener. On “Hair”, what seems like an honest narrative of an encounter with a groupie ends up with both Slug and his girlfriend dying in traffic. He deftly pulls the same trick he did on Lucy Ford’s “Nothing But Sunshine”, a heartbreaking account of his parents’ deaths which turned out to be a complete lie. Slug freely mocks his listeners as well as himself and everything around him, which is as captivating as it is frustrating.

One of the pleasures of following an artist’s albums is seeing his style change, hopefully for the better. Sluggo scraps his emotional style twice on the album for some good old Hip-Hop shit talking about the usual subjects: blowjobs, wack MC’s, drugs, and violence. On “Flesh” Slug is joined by I Self Divine over some harsh yet upbeat surf drums for some vicious back-and-forth rhymes. It’s a great tension-breaker amidst the sometimes-overwhelming fog of self-doubt and emotion.

As a disclaimer, fans of Atmosphere and the rest of the Rhyme Sayers will get pretty much what they came for, but this album is much more drenched with emotion than most heads are used to. Atmosphere’s unique formula is carried out well, but the success of the various attitudes that Slug exudes depends entirely on how much intensity that he puts into them. Slug’s choruses are undesirable, and a few are even harder to swallow; he rhymes words with themselves and other faux-pas. God Loves Ugly loses steam towards the end due to the simple fact that Slug really doesn’t pull off a casual song on the same level of quality as his more concentrated material. This isn’t necessarily a bad thing, but it adds an uneven quality to an album that comes out as less than the sum of its parts.

There’s no doubt Eyedea can slay his competitors onstage in a battle, but inside his own space the rules change; his skills won’t let him settle anything, they just allow him to articulate his madness with greater depth. He has a way of making his point so clearly in rhyme that it could not be felt any other way. In “On A Clear Day”, a dizzyingly contradictory song written for clarity, he describes himself as “just a parody of something that apparently was never properly prepared to bleed.” Poignancy like this is what makes this moving, thought-provoking material, but Eyedea’s method compromises its potency. Eyedea can rap extremely fast without slurring or dropping syllables, and his rhyme schemes are mind-blowing, but it’s very hard to keep up with when he’s bringing up serious issues. In a way it almost forces you to listen, but the listener misses a lot of the feeling trying to take it all in. Regardless, the thoughtful, artistic half of the album is a breathtaking experience.

The rest of the album is mostly straightforward up-tempo rhymes, with the usual attacks on the omnipresent wack MC and verbal discourse/bloody warfare metaphors. In these songs, Eyedea doesn’t have any real target for the shrapnel he spits, and the vicious, almost desperately immediate need for genius in a freestyle battle is lost in the studio. This is shown best in “Coaches” (feat. Carnage), where the live-taped intro is much more interesting than the track itself. The exception to the dis-appointing songs is the nonconformist anthem “Weird Side,” where he introduces himself and his quirks (namely that he’s an ugly white MC from the Midwest who’s better than most artists out there), at one point breaking into an unbelievable double time flow without skipping a beat. Like any master of the craft, he almost makes it sound easy to pull of saying “my mission is to get into your mind /and make you listen and rewind / what you were missing every time / that you insisted to be blind / I paint a picture with a rhyme. . .” before you have time to flip the CD case over to see what the name of the song is.

Even the weak tracks on Many Faces Of Oliver Hart serve to create a full self-portrait of a man, just as the conflicting styles on the album are what makes it complete. There is such a range of expression: personal anecdotes, heartbreaking narratives, protests against society, braggadocio, and even a torch song (“Here for You”). If you want music that is not just thoughtful but thought-provoking, then pick this one up.

While some groups like Jurassic 5 or People Under The Stairs bolster their styles by bringing Hip-Hop back to its organic roots, Antipop tries to distinguish itself by doing the opposite. Soldered together with grating electronic burps, alarm(ing) noises, and synth buzzes, Arrhythmia is a twisted sort of robotic Frankenstein. Antipop would of course be the mad scientists, and their obsession with experimentation is the best and worst part of the album. Some of the sounds they choose to put in come off as thrown in just for the hell of it, but some actually establish the melody. For example, the jingle bells and cricket sounds in “Silver Heat” are unnecessary, but the inventiveness of using Ping-Pong sounds (in full stereo) on the track “Ping Pong” transcends novelty and reaches a giddy nirvana with its bounce.

As deviant as their beats are, the Consortium’s rhymes push the limits of sense even further. Full of bizarre, fleeting imagery and harsh delivery, Antipop’s lines range from the somewhat disturbing to the hopelessly confusing. Sometimes they’ll beat a rhyme to death (“my symphonic monopoly philosophy sloppily etches notes awkwardly”) or ignoring it altogether (“I can write a rhyme where nothing rhymes…”). Sometimes they come off as amusingly peculiar with their references, with lines about ‘spraying freon on Celine Dion’ and such, but the songs don’t really make sense as a whole. Only when they tell stories are they close to intelligible, but even then they elect to rap about coke busts and the futility of killing soap scum.

Ultimately, Arrhythmia ends up disturbing the listener rather than the equilibrium. Most people look for music with some thought, emotion, or at least a nice melody, and the album is almost completely devoid of all these. It is interesting to hear something different, and some of the beats are decent, but everything else comes off strained. They’ve put such a weight on separation that the whole structure of their sound falters.