The Severed Cortex

Lifesavas - Gutterfly: The Original Soundtrack
Gutterfly is a concept hip hop album from Northwest rappers Lifesavas. For me, the only hip hop I can even listen to anymore is the progressive stuff coming out of Portland and Seattle. I guess even from the beginning of rap I've really only been attracted to the social commentary stuff as opposed to say Humpty Dance, Ridin Dirty, or It's Hot In Heere. I lean a lot more towards De La Soul, Disposable Heroes of HipHoprasy, Fugees, and Public Enemy.
The premise for Gutterfly is that it's a script for a blaxploitation film where the main characters, Sleepy and Bumpy, strive to get out of the mess that is Razorblade City (aka Portland). It's not really a stretch for rappers to put themselves in the role of someone else in their songs. It's the whole basis for gangster rap posers. In this case, Lifesavas don't have to lose any street cred by posing as something they aren't. Instead they pretty much tell their own story, with embellishment, under the guise of the movie script they're living out in the songs. At least they are taking hip hop to a different level than it gets taken too normally. In the eighties and nineties there were several flavors of rap, but today it's either gangster or throwaway dance. Seriously, you may have heard Sir Mix-a-Lot's Baby Got Back recently but I bet you haven't heard Nelly's Country Grammar since 2002.
Lifesavas stay true to the whole blaxploitation theme though. It's overloaded with funk and soul and I'm not saying it lightly when I say the beats are some of the sickest I've heard in a long time. It doesn't hurt your funk credibility when you have George Clinton and Fishbone making appearances either. The story line is also sort of like a blaxploitation movie too; thinner than a Coffee Brown blouse. The rapping is only slightly thicker than that. It's the beats that make this a good CD to me. You'll never remember a line of the rapping, but you'll play the beats over and over in your head.

Earl Greyhound - Soft Targets
Right from the opening note of S.O.S. you start thinking Led Zeppelin. Lead singer Matt Whyte has a fair sounding resemblance to Robert Plant when Plant could really belt it out. Forty five seconds later when the chorus kicks in you're wondering if this might be the last song to not make the cut on In Through The Out Door. The rest of the disc borrows heavily from rock and roll bands in the 1968 - 1973 era. Real rock and roll like Deep Purple, James Gang, and Uriah Heep. Maybe not so much the Uriah Heep prog rock type music, but definitely that heavy seventies guitar fuzz sound.
Let's face it, there aren't a lot of bands out there making this retro sound and I doubt there are any others besides Earl Greyhound who copy the sound and still make it their own. If you're not into heavy guitars this probably isn't going to be your cup of tea. If you'd like to a trip back to the very early seventies, you could very easily slip this into your CD player and pretend you're taking a ride in your Dodge Charger listening to that new FM radio.

They Might Be Giants - Flood
What?! You're shocked I didn't already own this? So was I. I know I owned it at one time but my last recollection of seeing it was somewhere around 1992. I was simply incredulous when one of my co-workers, who shall remain nameless, told me he had never heard of They Might Be Giants. How is that even possible? So, I went home that day and looked for my copy of Flood, only to not find it. iTunes is way too easy for me to buy music. Before electronic music, I had to force myself to refrain going into record stores because it's way too easy for me to drop $100 on music. Now I have to really watch going out to the iTunes store. I love having pretty much anything ever recorded on demand, but I find myself quickly becoming a junkie to it. (Steve Jobs laughs to himself ... and makes another trip to the bank).
They Might Be Giants have certainly improved in both sound and song quality over the years, but Flood seems to be the one that I like the most. Istanbul (Not Constantinople) and Birdhouse In Your Soul are my favorites, but there's a lot of other songs on this release that are considered They Might Be Giants staples. Plus, you have to give them props for realizing that everyone really does want a rock to wind a piece of string around.
It should be noted that after borrowing the CD for a trip to Wisconsin, he returned to say he loved it. He wasn't sure if his wife and daughter did, but he certainly did. I had no doubt.