Reviewed by by Trey Palmisano
Indie (2009)
There’s something special about listening to an album that just sounds different from everything you’ve been hearing and catches you completely off guard. As I settled in to one CD after another, banging out a handful of reviews, it was finally time to stage BillyBo’s “A Little Piece of Home.” The slovenly, drab, and antiqued picture of a domestic interior on the CD’s front cover was telling of someone’s sad reality. In my own private place, I imagined I heard the twang of a banjo, the howl of coyote, a backfiring truck, and the roar of a shotgun…all the stereotypical images of redneck life.
Thankfully, there was no stereotyping the lyrical prowess of BillyBo, whose rhymes bend effortlessly like light through a stained glass window of heavy funk beats, acoustic guitars, and crooning bluesy background vocals. It’s easy to think of Everlast as his alter ego Whitey Ford or Kid Rock during his initial mainstream years when the two paid tribute to their own country influences. The young rapper from Dover, PA talks about the travails of a single-parent home, domestic dysfunction, drugs and alcohol, and the hope that seeps through the most hopeless of circumstances.
So let’s break down the “what’s hot” on this album. Expect deep lyricism…the kind that stares a troubling past in the face with all the resolve and confidence of a man who has an infectious, though not overly gushing, optimism. Expect beats that crawl into your brain box like a Trojan horse virus, working their way into the background noise until eventually they take over and you can’t root them out – sitting in your cubicle, grabbing a cup of coffee, picking up your laundry, sitting in a traffic jam – you might find yourself rapping along with BillyBo, “one more mile till I reach my destination…”
The kid also sounds eerily like Manchild from Mars Ill. There’s just a feel to his delivery that attests to this guy’s Mars Ill record collection, a delivery that is cultivated in a studied approach to the MCs that speak to him most clearly…a fact he admits on “The Records That Changed My Life” though without naming them. While the first single dropped is supposed to be a ringer (in this case “One More Mile”), I was most impressed by the songs that you might be more likely to pass over. “Chains and Things” has a melodic soulful hook that you can’t shake. “Today” has a haunting beat with precision lyricism. “Change in Scene” has a thumping funky beat complete with “a rattle in the cage” though BillyBo “can’t seem to find it” even though it loops through the track. “Finding My Way” is just a spot-on melodrama of loss and the possibility of meaning regained when life comes into clear view.
Any head bangers on this one – the kind that make you want to hit “repeat” on your CD player a thousand times and never look back? Probably not. The project is more like a fine wine whose aftertaste never leaves your pallet. The tracks are all closely coordinated that you can let the album play and forget you’ve just ran through a dozen songs. For some artists that’s good. For others, not so good. For BillyBo, it’s definitely more of the first.
And it’s albums like this that remind me how sad the situation truly is that hip hop had to go so far underground to make a point about its invaluable staying power as a musical art form. From what BillyBo confesses (see interview), this is his most solid project yet, the one he is most proud of, and this reviewer can’t but echo that sentiment. This is high quality, setting-the-bar, testimony-type narrative that sneaks up on you through the story rather than pounding at you through a series of dogmatic statements. This journeyman respects life, despite all its imperfections. And it’s in seeing the bottom and taking his listeners there that makes the journey out so much sweeter. He respects the grace that is available to us all and treats each episode in life with sensitivity as if it were his own story. But a lot of it is, and that’s what makes him so capable of handling the material.
For fans of: Mars Ill, Deep Space 5, Playdough, Mr. J. Medeiros, Braille
Original review rating of 4.5/5
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