Posted on 05/04/2009
Cesar Comanche was mad cool when he bigged up the mom and pop record stores on Little Brother’s “Heaven” off the Just Us Bootleg a few years back. Yet, his exclamations of “the small chain record store got shit you never heard before!” wasn’t so much an endorsement to independent hip-hop retailers as it was a tribute to the originality and legacy of underground rap both past and present. Spin a couple of revolutions of Comanche’s solo album Die In Your Lap, and the vitality of his encomium for the local record shop becomes apparent. A long time ago, this boom bap North Carolinian realized he better pucker up to the very coterie of retailers that would most likely stock his own music.

Produced by the prodigious 9th Wonder and a slew of alternative ‘hop mainstays like Khrysis, Science, and Apple Juice Kid, Die in Your Lap is the offspring of the conscious subbrand that influenced it. Soaked in Comanche’s vocals is the throaty-shout flow that engraved acts like EPMD and A Tribe Called Quest onto the abstract hip-hop emblem. The foils, on the other hand, to such a profile would be wannabee organic hip-hoppers which Comanche addresses in the title track. He spits, “You’re with the sideshow/ With the other save hip-hop ass niggas, you all could die/ But wait, you sound contrived with kick drums, snares, and samples/ Fan based can never be ample enough…” showing that even in a more peaceful subcategory of rap, there is clash.

One of the more charming cuts on Die In Your Lap is actually an interlude called “Hello World.” On the two-minute interlude, Hip-Hop practitioners from all over the globe rep their birth places with homage-paying drops. The interlude is cornered by an archipelago of solid tracks like the 9th-assisted “Hands High” which presents the best of Cesar’s elevated delivery.

It’s up to underground hip-hop’s secret society of fans to determine whether the small chain record store will indeed swing business to Die In Your Lap. Although very shiny, the LP is still a pebble amongst a sea of conscious sediment and lyrically, it’s still under the sun in terms of subject matter. Nonetheless, experiences show that audiences who love this kind of academic hip-hop, tend to love it again and again.

- Sidik Fofana