Vicious Cycle

I'm sure this trio of white NY female rappers are tired of Beastie Boys references. The similarities are actually fairly minimal. Hesta Prynn, DJ Sprout, and Guinea Love are intellectual, political, and have a taste for old school beats and overdriven effects. And they sound like New Yorkers. That's pretty much the end of the similarities. The pre release hype has been strong (and the inevitable backlash just as strong). The bottom line is this is a solid first release from some very talented rappers.

The music and production (they produced it themselves) is strong, the raps are solid (with the exception of a tendency to sound like Janice from Friends on the sung choruses), the lyrics are challenging and clever.

Very NY centric, they namecheck scenesters you and I have never heard of and don't care about, but they also reference Chekhov, Gore, Edmund Hillary, Eric Schlosser, and Tom Robbins. Lyrically, they sometimes stretch to make a rhyme, but you have to admire anyone who can properly use palimpset in a song and not have it sound contrived. You can easily just groove to the songs and have fun dancing, or listen to the words and understand that there's a lot of brainpower in this group.

Hot spots: Vicious Cycle, Signal Flow, Dying In Stereo