Deepspace 5
Mars ILL. Tunnel Rats. ill harmonics. The Pride. Circumcised Mind. Phonetic Composition. Labklik. If you are a hip-hop head with common sense, these groups have got the skills necessary to earn a place in your headphones. Now, what do you think would happen if select members of each of these groups decided to combine their talents and form a dream team?
Pure bliss- a perfect description of Deepspace 5’s debut Uprok Records album The Night We Called It A Day. The starting lineup of all-stars on The Night We Called It A Day is:
- manCHILD (Mars ILL, The Pride)
- DJ Dust (Mars ILL)
- Sev Statik (Tunnel Rats)
- Playdough (ill harmonics, Phonetic Composition)
- Freddie Bruno (Phonetic Composition)
- Beat Rabbi (Circumcised Mind)
- Listener (Labklik)
- Sintaxtheterrific (The Pride)
- Recon (The Pride)
Deepspace 5 successfully captures the raw but musical beats and intelligent, rhythmic poetry of what is commonly known as underground hip-hop. This form of the hip-hop revolution has become largely ignored nowadays in favor of overly commercial, shallow and repetitive material designed for clubs - ignoring hip-hop’s conscious origin in the streets and also the need for something lasting in the lyrical content (Jesus).
The Night We Called It A Day contains 15 tracks filled with sharp, brainy wordplay and beats filled with hard-hitting percussion, dusty horn, bass, guitar, flute and vocal samples plus diamond-sharp DJ turntable scratches.
The songs on the album will leave your neck sore from excessive head-bobs.
Stick This In Your Ear, (featuring a Jurassic 5-style old school chant during the chorus over funky, chopped and re-arranged bass and panflute samples) has become a crowd favorite, getting over 70 plays in one week at one of the nation’s most popular music stations in Ohio. Listener’s landmark verse (where he raps all the punctuation as well as the words in his rhyme) has helped his popularity skyrocket in the hip-hop community.
Another blazing track is The Night We Called It A Day, where every emcee in the crew exchanges show-stopping verses with the precision and ease of fielders on a baseball team throwing a ball back and forth.
On World Go Round, jazzy samples drive the lyricism of Playdough, Listener and manCHILD as they discuss the power God has in making everything in the world work together and exist. |
