The first thing you need to know about Chamillionaire is that he's one of the greatest rappers on the planet, sly and quick-tongued with perfect timing and better punchlines than first-album Eminem, and he has a sticky-sweet deadpan singing voice that nails hooks like Nate Dogg. In 2003, he and Paul Wall released Get Ya Mind Correct, one of the best Southern rap albums ever. Everything that everyone ever says about 3 Feet High and Rising is even more true about Get Ya Mind Correct: smartass dorks tossing goofy-sharp jokes back and forth, bringing a sense of play to a genre not known for it and sidestepping their lack of hardness by making light of it, even celebrating it. Paul's clumsy charm makes him a valuable foil, but it's all Chamillionaire, crooning the hooks and wrapping his irresistible liquid flow around sunburst Houston-synth beats, getting in all the best lines: "They said rap was a waste of knowledge, 'Take ya ass to college'/ Now they broke asses call us, try to ask for dollars."
A lot has happened since 2003. Soon after Cham and Paul split from each other and began quietly feuding, the rap world discovered Houston, and Cham signed a solo deal with Universal. When you're one of the greatest rappers in the world, you're going to be facing some pressure when you're releasing the first solo album of your career. And even if your sense of humor is your primary strength, you might decide that you want to be taken seriously.
Get Ya Mind Correct was great partly because it followed no formats and pandered to no audiences; it's mostly just about cars. But on The Sound of Revenge, Cham makes a common mistake: He tries to be all things to all people, making songs for every rap audience. He touches all the bases: love-rap ("Grown and Sexy"), club-rap ("Peepin' Me"), street-rap ("No Snitching"). The fill-in-the-blanks approach kept Cham's fellow Houston MC Bun B's solo debut Trill from being the classic it should've been, and it has the same effect here. Cham smothers his sense of humor and only gives rare glimpses of his personality. It's all solid, but it's never transcendent. On "Southern Takeover", Killer Mike becomes possibly the first rapper ever to outshine Cham on a track; that wouldn't have happened two years ago.
But it's always a joy to hear Cham's effortlessly slippery flow even when he's not playing to his strengths. And a few tracks on the album show that Cham is at least maturing in the right direction. On "Rain", a gorgeous piano-laced, Scarface-assisted soul track, Cham gets inspirational: "Tired of being poor, trying to leave the rats/ Walk out to see that three of your tires would be on flat/ And that one tire left's a sign of hope/ That helps you keep on grinding when you're kinda broke." If Cham can give us an entire album as powerful as "Rain" next time, he'll have another classic on the level of Get Ya Mind Correct.
