I’ve gotta finally say some­thing about my favorite album of 2008. I keep going back to it and smil­ing the entire way through it over and over. In Feb­ru­ary of 2007, I found out about this new project of Chris de Luca’s with Phon.o. Their mixes I linked to were full of bass, beats, and insane elec­tro. At the time, they were talk­ing about work­ing on an album, and a year later, it arrived, Super­con­ti­nen­tal, all orig­i­nal pro­duc­tion and vocals from a num­ber of extremely tal­ented MCs I’ve never heard of. The style skews a lit­tle towards an electro-bass sound moreso than straight-up hip-hop. The bass is heavy and vocals catchy and rel­a­tively free from lewd­ness or misog­yny, some­thing refresh­ing from an album made for the club like this. It’s a strik­ingly retro album, with the major­ity of the MCs act­ing like old school MCs and hyp­ing the music more than any­thing. Take two of my favorite tracks, both fea­tur­ing Rayzaflo, “Putcha Handz Up” and “Flash­bakk.” Both of these songs cen­ter around the nar­ra­tor going out to the club to dance and have fun. And the way she has fun is through the music, not drugs or sex­ual innu­endo; to her, the focus is the music she’s danc­ing to. Rayzaflo comes on like the sec­ond com­ing of Rox­anne Shante with these tracks, and the music even reflects a slight Mar­ley Marl stripped down, gigan­tic beat style. My other favorite song fea­tures an MC named White Gold Princess who turns in some truly hilar­i­ous lines (a com­par­i­son to Biz would be appro­pri­ate here, com­plet­ing the Juice Crew ana­log) in an end­less cycle of var­i­ous fast food restau­rants serv­ing to coun­ter­play the sex­ual shenani­gans going on. I can’t rec­om­mend this album enough. It’s the type of album that makes me wish I had real­ized my college-era dream of being a DJ. Drop­ping some of these tracks on an unsus­pect­ing club would bring it down.
CLP — “Super­con­fi­den­tial (Remix)” (mp3)
CLP — Fac­tory Fresh Mix (mp3)
CLP — Listen@Website (more mp3s)