Invincible
ShapeShifters (Emergence)
By Niema Jordan
Published: June 22nd, 2008 | 1:06pm
If you are hungry for hip-hop, Invincible's debut album ShapeShifters serves up more than a full helping. With this debut, the Detroit-based MC has managed something that most can't accomplish: An album that stays true to its musical roots, while still giving you base-lines you can bump in your car. This is music you can move to or chill to, but also music that always stays true to the artist. And that's not easy. On her mission to “be one of the best period/ Not just the best with breasts and a period,” which she rhymes on her track "Looongawaited," Invincible chooses lyrical skill and swag over sex appeal and nonsense.
Released on the artist's own Emergence label, ShapeShifters is a modern activist's soundtrack. “People Not Places,” features songstress Abeer painting pictures of injustices in the Palestinian and Jewish conflict over a beat so infectious you may start to fall into a groove before you figure out what's really going on. The song is followed by the political banger “Spacious Skies," a history-packed song that raises tons of questions in the short two minutes and 10 seconds that it occupies on the album.
The all female hip-hop crew ANOMOLIES makes an appearance in hopes of reclaiming the music that they know so well. Along the way they touch on a few other issues. Take the thought-provoking track “Ransom Notes,” for example: the song provides lines like, “We demand that you stop making hip-hop commercialized/ Before it meets its own demise by the devil in disguise,” and manages to appeal to everyone’s inner hip-hop head. New York Nu-Soul crooner Tiombe Lockhart’s alternative R&B vocals help Invincible create the haunting “Ropes,” which deals with depression and suicide with an honesty that can be hard to stomach.
ShapeShifters is the album for those suffering from Golden-era nostalgia; those who only rock to the Mos Defs and Kwelis of the world; and those just wondering what untainted hip-hop sounds like.
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