Streets Won’t Let Me Chill
In The Ruff
Get In Line
Diamond District
In The Ruff, 2009

This is another group that has been getting a lot of blog attention from the usual suspects (okayplayer, put me on it, freshselects, moovmnt, onsmash, 2dopeboyz, nahright…) which is actually really good. Diamond District is Oddisee, X.O. & yU; three solo artists from “The DMV” (DC/Maryland/Virginia) that released this album together as a free download on their blog on April 14th.

In the intro, Oddisee says “we formed this group to bring that east coast raw boom-bap hip hop to the DMV” and they do just that. I’m sure some people might think this album sounds dated but they knew exactly what they were doing, they were making it for all the grown folks who grew up with east coast hip hop. And judging by the response, there is a quite an audience to which it sounds very fresh.

To me, Oddisee’s production is the real draw here (he produced 10 of the 12 tracks). I suppose lyrics only stand out to me if they are really good or noticeably bad. These mostly fall somewhere between decent and forgettable but there are a few things that caught my attention like, “develop the mic voice, cause if it don’t work, i gotta go to work and get a job with my white voice” (from “Streets Won’t Let Me Chill”).

Oddisee also recently released the mostly Instrumental Odd Summer EP which you can download here.

Songs are available for two weeks.

This entry was posted on Thursday, July 2nd, 2009 at 2:25 pm and is filed under Music Appreciation. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.