Southernplayalisticadillacmuzik Review

The sound is the statement. While New York was building beats from hard loops and California was replaying funk with a sneer, Organized Noize made this out of live bass, organ, guitar and drums played in a room, and the result moves at a completely different pace, humid and unhurried. Player's Ball is the calling card, a Christmas song with no Christmas in it, and it still sounds like a whole city on a warm night.

Git Up, Git Out is the serious one, four verses about wasting your life delivered by people barely old enough to have wasted any. Crumblin' Erb has a beautiful arrangement. Both rappers are still developing, one plainspoken and precise, the other already looking for a stranger way to say things, and the interplay between those two habits becomes the entire story of the group. A confident, generous debut that opened a door nobody had tried.