Soul-Junk's second album for Daniel Smith's Sounds Familyre label picks up where the band left off with 1942. As opposed to their earlier material with Homestead or Shrimper, the songs here are straight-up hip-hop and rap. The band is now just a slim duo, with founding member
Glen Galaxy showing off quite capable lyrical rhythms and his partner Slo-Ro handling the sound manipulation. Since
Galaxy's vocals are steady, the album ends up making or breaking with Slo-Ro's handling of the music. Although the manipulation can sometimes border on annoying, at other times it's astounding -- but for the most part it is quite steady. For a band that has totally changed genres over the course of its career,
Soul-Junk has shown with
1958 that it can do so competently and creatively. ~ Kurt Morris