Posted on 06/16/2008
Protest In Disguise is a sonically mish-mashed battle cry. But while Myself takes on most of America's ills, he still finds time to pay homage to the positive factors constructing his makeup. Overall, it's a well-balanced record, albeit slightly far reaching at times. One thing shines through right from the get; this is an intelligent dude

Some extremes work better than others. The louder jams are bit tougher to digest. Grinding guitars and aggressively sung vocals dominate "Baby… You Drive Me Crazy" and "Katrina," both tracks playing dangerously close to the somehow indelible flame of "rap rock." On the other hand, the album's opener, "Keep The Fire Burnin," is still in your face lyrically but the replacement of the metal elements by some finely laced horns and a more formatted rap cadence make it more agreeable to the eardrums.

On the low end, Myself scores big with "God Is So Funky." Keyboards, organs and more acoustic sounding guitars lay a soulful head-nodic foundation for his amusing take on why God must have been black; If God had a band she would be the conductor, Thelonious on keys, lead vocals by Stevie Wonder and I would be the drummer, breakbeats, no double takes, Robert Johnson on guitar, Bootsy Collins playing the bass. He further big-ups his ancestry on the beautiful piano track, "A Woman Named Nina." "Black Mama" and "Where We Going?" take it down a notch further to Michael Franti type territory with mandolin plucks and distantly muted beats providing melodic mellow space for the man speak.

To show it doesn't have to be one extreme or the other, Myself drops some solid mid-tempo joints like "Movement" and "Get Up." What differentiates these more "standard" tracks from the hip-hop pack is dude's honestly-informed, historically aware and forward-thinking vocals. Myself may not be at the protest level of PE or Rage or atop the musically accomplished platform of Spearhead or The Roots yet, but dude is in the mindset for intelligent expression, change and musical diversity- all relevant qualities in the current state of reality.

- Jeff Artist