producer: phil rust

If you are born in the Bronx, you live, breathe, and most likely also shit hip hop. Hence picking up a mic or doing anything else associated with the culture is mandatory. In the case of Blak Skar and Del Cloga of Strange Sanity, they chose to pick up the mic. And their surrounding made it necessary for them to spit verses about the street live, and about what's ugly and what's real about life there. However, what separates them from the hundreds of other street rappers is, a) they sound good spitting their verses, and b) they got Phil Rust handling the production side of the project. And this cat's beats are not only interesting, they are creative, different, but still never too left field to give this project an unwanted sound.

So he's able to pull off a rather happy and bounce friendly, however real nice "Lyrical Stickup", as well as a dark, dramatic and menacing "Facts Of Life" and "Runnin Mad". Despite "Dayz R Dun" or "Form A Huddle" being somewhat bare, Phil still puts a million and more little effects in there that continually give little changes to the beat, with the latter even featuring some Chinese monk chanting. We like to bang the somewhat 90s "Feel Us", while "It's A Must" gets somewhat pop and Mediterranean, with the guitar plucking. But on the other end of the spectrum, "Glamar N Glitta" is only coming cool once that most prominent sound is dropped, and "Deep Talent" or "Settle The Score" are cuts that could have been done by someone else, hence lacking character.

The lyrics then, as already mentioned, reflect the realities of Strange Sanity's West Bronx life. Meaning you get the typical amalgam of spitting to represent, you get the fiending for the paper, the tales of adrenaline rushes, as well as the business is wack cuts. But as said before: what separates them from the truckload of other artists that do the same, they sound cool doing it. Their flow is smooth, they are accomplishing the rare feat of sounding effortless, sounding like they just chit chat, instead of being forced in a rhyme pattern that doesn't come natural to 'em. What doesn't make them the best lyricists on this planet, but the fact that these kids are coming with the rhymes in appealing ways, and the beats being proper too, means that this album would be to many people's liking, they just haven't yet heard of it.

Oh yeah, you get all the instrumentals at the end of the album too, what allows you to check out the beats even more closely. And it looks like that the listing is messed up, meaning that on cut five we suddenly get the chorus talking about 'lyrical stickups', while on the cover the cut is called "Poetic Pros" and it's track two that's called "Lyrical Stickup". Hence we gotta mention that this review is referring to the tracks, the way they are named in the cover.