3 out of 5

Label: Sounds Are Active / Sounds Familyre

Producer: Glen Galaxy (Vocals Tracked by Tim Coffman?)

This album was on permanent repeat in my player for quite some time upon its release, but is also the album that I’ve had the most swing of opinion on.  It was just such a new sound at the time, fully blending the out-and-out noise that bubbles through the Soul-Junk / Truman’s Water catalogue with the hip-hop that popped up on the last album, signaled by the so off-kilter blast of (post intro-track Phalanx) Non-Linear… which is still a great song, but it’s a distracting one.  It distracted me for the rest of the album, which has some similarly excellent uses of noise and beats and rhymes but there’s some missteps: the most primary one being that some of the lyrics pull the typical MC trick of hyping oneself as a great MC.  That’s… fine… but… but we weren’t MCs until recently and Galaxalag and Slo-ro really aren’t great MCs, their flow pretty stuttery and their rhymes hopping around between word association and jesus references.  Posturing is part of the game, it’s just the album doesn’t feel like it belongs in the game, so the posturing seems silly once you start listening (once you’re no longer distracted).  This feeds into the other issue, which is that the album, when taken as a whole, doesn’t feel comfortable.  Perhaps after the praise of their first foray into rap, the SJ crew tried to push it out to a new level… and, as mentioned, they did, but there’s that element of trying which starts to seep in when you feel like you’re being yanked from track to track.  The composition is much stronger on the album that follows, when they seemed to get a better grasp of the spasm of styles they were going for.  And I hate to single someone out, but Slo-ro is allowed some undistorted vocals on here and it just doesn’t work.  He sounds like a backpacky anticon kid and it uncools the whole thing for me, and ya’lls know I just want to be cool.  So.  Don’t do that.
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