Is this the same group? They must have gone home and did their homework or something. The production is tighter and less murky, the song structures have started to exist, some of the mc's have decided to throw rhymes in every once in awhile, and in general it sounds a lot more coherent and thought-out than the worst-titled album ever, "Music for the Advancement of Hip Hop." I think the biggest difference is that Anticon found their niche here. They're not really hip hop, they're more of poets with music. So get rid of Slug, someone said, and replace him with more poets! So they found a way to take lyric poetry and release it on CD. And the way to do that, lo and behold, is to structure it like songs. Sole and Dose One, two of the most annoying mc's ever on that other album, do a dual/duel rapping workout on "A.D.D.", and it actually sounds sorta good! Sage Francis, who actually is a hip hop artist, appears on this album and his beats and rhymes are lightyears beyond anything I expected to find when I popped it in. I'm still not big on Buck 65, whose "Pen Thief" sounds like whatever the take before the first take is called, and I could also do without the annoying "Postmodern Pat Boones" or the inane skit that follows, but overall this is an improvement to a degree I would never have thought possible.
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