Deepspace 5

Giving love to God as often as to hip-hop may not be the quickest road to success, but the 11 members of the Wu Tang Clan-style "super group" Deepspace 5 demonstrate skills on their debut album that should get them respect, regardless of the message. Plus, God isn't really the focus here. No, The Night We Called It A Day is an album of high concept songs peppered with praises to God, but containing a few exceptions, such as the testimonials of "Winter in Manhattan." But mostly the album is dominated by concepts such as "Elementary," where members of DS5 imagine themselves as different elements from the periodic table, and "Joywriting," a joy-filled ode to writing. Also interesting to note is "Closed Caption," a sign language freestyle novelty by Fong, a deaf MC, which is ironically translated to us by DS5 member Listener. And while there are a number of higher profile MCs, such as soul heir the manChild (of Mars ILL) and Playdough (of Ill Harmonics), the most inventive verses come from Listener, who outshines them both with his uniquely punctuated verse on "Stick This In Your Ear" and his extended metaphor of writing as driving on "Joywriting." Uprok better start working on getting a full album out from this guy soon. However, that's not to slight the other vocal members (Sev Statik, Sintax, Freddie Bruno and Playdough), who all hold their own over the album. And while the beats may not be groundbreaking, the DS5 beatsmiths (Dust, Freddie Bruno, Beat Rabbi and Harry Krum, the beat-making pseudonym for Playdough) submit superbly structured songs of many varieties, from bangers ("Stick This In Your Ear" and "Winter in Manhattan") to introspective ("This Curse I Bear" and "Ziontific"). Deepspace 5 is another example that Christian hip-hop is taking great strides forward.