Solesides used to be a crew of smart-ass college-educated rappers from the Bay Area. Now they're Quannum Projects, talent incubator for the West Coast underground. Their latest project is the Lifesavas, two kids from Portland who rap but didn't start out as MCs: Jumbo the Garbageman is a sample-monger at heart, and Vursatyl is really a streetwise vocalist. This works, as Jumbo's punchy vamps only get expanded by veteran producer Chief Xcel (of Blackalicious fame), and Vursatyl's subdued hooks are broken up by a whole guesthouse full of mercenary rappers (including Gift of Gab, Latyrx, and J-Live). Still, while there's no lack of variety in structure, style, and content, after a few listens one starts pining for the instrumentals.
Opener "Soldierfied" is a janky, thorax-blunting session, typical of the clean kicks and filthy snares to follow. The battle rhymes, impelled more by villainous vamps than any heartfelt hostility, bleed over into "It's Over": "Who cares if you can rhyme in Arabic with a Portuguese accent [and] recorded your demo 30 below zero in the basement of a Buddhist shrine?" Vursatyl first breaks out his street-smoothed singing voice in "What If It's True?", a catchy, vacant jam on the level of, say, the Black-Eyed Peas. It's great that Quannum isn't afraid to hire the occasional session musician, and the rhythm tracks stay compulsively spare and unpretentious; the only real musical letdowns on the album come a good forty minutes later, with the rushed and unrappable "Emerge" and a flat rehearing of "Blackbird".
In "Hellohihey", Vursatyl plays the ghosts of his own egos past, present and future, in a trite but well-executed parable about ego trips, whose punchline draws a nice distinction between raw egotism and healthy self-hype. The rest of the morals on Spirit in Stone, however, are less predictable and more controversial: one song manages to come out against abortion, cloning, sodomy, pornography and war almost in the same breath. So when Lifesavas say, "Careful what you rep of the new left, only a few left," it's an open question whether they're counting themselves. Like good liberals, they distance themselves from oil politics, corporate scandals, and terror profiling. So what do they want? First, reparations for slavery. Then "revenge for the engineered virus, slit they eyelids, carve a image in they iris." Are you listening, Howard Dean?
It just gets weirder as a Last Judgment vibe takes over the album's farthest reaches. "5th Horseman" is a mix of undead camp and apocalyptic politics. "Inventing proverbs in the hot tub-- famine, pestilence: here come the fifth horseman in a b-boy stance!" This is not your pastor's Book of Revelations. Then "Skeleton" wins the Most Unlikely Sample prize for 2003, dunking a folk ghost song into a nasty, swaggering clav pocket ("Have you seen the ghost of John?/ Long white bones and the rest all gone/ Wouldn't it be chilly with no skin on?"). Here Lifesavas take a break from abrasive self-righteousness to make room for some real, if stale, theological speculation: "The world's worst death was in the kiss," they muse. "The greatest trick the devil ever pulled was convincing us he didn't exist." There's no danger of that for these rappers, who must either see a lot of movies, or a world of men teeming with Satan's work. Everyone else will have to get by on faith that the instrumental album exists.
