Music reviews. CD reviews. Critically hip!

  8Ball is a Memphis rapper who has been around for well over a decade, dropping joints intermittently throughout. LIGHT UP THE BOMB is an ambitious project that results in what is arguably his best work to date.8Ball is Dirty South, from beginning to end, with an emphasis on Atlanta ...

Anthony Hamilton is The Man. I put SOUTHERN COMFORT on two days ago and can't get it out of the player, not that I've tried. He’s got that Bill Withers’ groove going, the one that isn't always the current big thing but never really goes away either. This is what ...

You have got to give James Alexander credit. The Bar-Kays had a gig as a Otis Redding’s concert band and a monster radio hit titled “Soul Finger” on the charts when the band, and Redding were tragically killed in a plane crash in the mid-1960s. Alexander, ironically, missed the plane, ...

Newcomer to the R&B scene, Darien Brockington showcases his soulful voice on his first full length release, "Somebody to Love."  Although the album can become a bore after the midpoint and is not exactly spell-binding, Brockington proves that he has the potential to become a force to be reckoned with ...

Not everyone agrees with me, but even if you call this crass commercial pandering (and I don‘t), this seems like a pretty cool concept. Toyota had an idea to market to a younger urban market and invested in a hip-hop label. Scion Records (named after the selfsame Toyota vehicle) has ...

ATLANTIS: HYMNS FOR DISCO by K-Os is one of those discs that I heard all sorts of things about before I actually heard it. The general consensus was that one track --- “Sunday Morning” --- is a killer and the rest of the project sucks. I accordingly went directly to ...

There is a hysterical Chris Rock piece in which, as a public service, Rock instructs black folks on how to behave when being stopped by the po-leece, as he says, so as not to incur a beating. Under the instruction to “turn that s**t off,” he shows a gangsta war ...

Radium88, from what I am able to determine, is a British aggregation which is fairly popular on the underground club circuit, though I wouldn't necessarily call anything on ONLY SCIENCE CAN TELL US THE TRUTH, their latest release, dance music. I will also readily confess that my ability to differentiate ...

Saafir has been around for awhile. The earliest joint a can remember from him is “Body Hat Syndrome” which he cut as a part of Digital Underground in the early 1990s. He parlayed that into a deal with Warner, and dropped a couple of critically acclaimed discs. He has more ...

The Hall of Justus is, if I have this right, a production company of rappers and producers from North Carolina that slide in and out of tracks with a dizzying frequency that no one under the age of 25 can properly follow. I'm not even going to pretend to have ...

The Heatmakerz are a New York City production team who could have just as easily called themselves “The Hitmakerz,” having produced tracks on gold and platinum selling CDs for such rappers as Lil Wayne, Cam’ron, and The Diplomat, as well as hits for Ludacris and Twista, among many others. THE ...