If you’re one to speculate as to why most emcees rarely smile on wax, Murs will undoubtedly offer clues.You gotta love an emcee who relentlessly spits truth to rhyme to make Underground raw shit at the risk of biting the hand that feeds him. Because he’s black (a rarity in "indie" rap) and he’s telling nothing but the truth (which is even rarer for any kneegrow in the racket), he stands out as one of the hardest working emcees in the business. Period.

The mid-city Hell-A-errr best describes his steez as sitcom-rap where, like Byron, he renders elements of everday entertaining. This time’s no exception as the Living Legends/Def Jux synergize into an undeniable essential. Dog could spit acapella and it’d still be fire! So it goes without saying that every beat on this album will tear that ass out the socket like a Doberman holding down an auto lot. The last cut of the collection, "Got Damned?" is such a triple-beam dream that it deserves to be first. The second verse alone is a hip-hop quotable and tempered by a Heatmakerz-like sampling of a screwed-up oldie accompanied by an assjacking lyrical assault on the misguided perceptions of a rap persona.

The second track, "I Know," mimics the same sound you’d hear from Jaz-O: screwed-up sampling, loping tempo, stutterstep plucking synths, and a lyrical nod to an underlying principle of hip-hop: playing the face card of self-awareness. "Last Night (I Almost Got Shot On My Block)" is about life during perpetual wartime in Bucktown USA and sports the tagline, "Last night I almost got shot on my block/Not the block where I live at/The block where I chill at/Where I keep it real at/And used to pack steel at/Times I feel it’s the spot I’ll be killed at." The song plays like the soundtrack to Cube’s transcendance toward the end of Boyz in the Hood to a key-sharp-needling beat.

Other tracks to peep include "Happy Pills," featuring Aesop Rock, and the theme to the Houston 500 marathon fuckfest; the nostalgic ode to the quarter-pipe sport, "Transitions of a Rider," accompanied by a beat constructed from the percussion of rolling hardware on hardwood from a16-year vet of the cultivator of independence. There’s also the the hilarious laid-back roots inflected sexapade from Shock G and DU MOing Tom Cruise in Risky Business followed by the southern-slurred bout-it-bout-it duet "The Dance" with El-P, who boarded "God’s Work" and "Def Cover," two top-heavy cortical crunkers chronicling an ordinary day in the life of a not-so-ordinary emcee grinding for the rent, and the travails of his life on the road from dusk to dawn with as idiosyncratic bunch like the Living Legends that’s the equivalent of a 187 on underground punks, respectively.

MONTEZUMA