Consumer Guide Album

Billy Woods: Church [Backwoodz Studioz, 2022]
You gotta admire this guy. His groaned raps crackpot yet deeply informed, his electrosymph beats textural by default while falling short of arresting or hypnotic, he steeps his rhymes in the lore of the church in the jungle his grandfather built and via his Marxist dad takes armed revolt more seriously than Immortal Technique and Dead Prez combined. "The shit I wrote can't do it on a phone," he brags amid references to "Ceaucescu's chess moves," "an Amharic Bible she found on 113th," a stabbing at Shakespeare in the Park, and A Supposedly Fun Thing I'll Never Do Again. "Win or lose the Maoists is still glum," he reports. Which may be because "When the revolution was over they gave 'em half of what they promised." B+