Wow. We’ve been waiting a long time for this one. Something close to three years now… Without any further shenanigans, TheNewConfusion is happy to announce…
WordSmith’s debut album Of Mics and Men is now available!
Click Here to Download
Of Mics and Men is at once homage to the landscape of Josh Smith’s upstate New York upbringing and a 28-minute lyric letter of appreciation to the community that helped him come to be. Backed by Jared Paul’s clever, often cryptic beats, Of Mics and Men is at once full of restlessness and of sweetness, locating WordSmith in his own process of balancing his fierce love of community in tracks like “Of Mics and Men,” with the home that he’s made in the quietest recesses of himself in “Keys,” where he locates himself, saying: “I’m in the middle writing riddles in the form of raps / live from the eye trying to find where the storm is at.”
Lyrically, WordSmith’s rhymes are delicate and carefully wound. While he deals with topics ranging from community to relationships to self-knowledge and compassion for the distance between human hearts, his rhymes are uniformly intentional, tight and visually complex. WordSmith has the quiet courage of P.O.S and the late poet Frank Stanford’s acumen for blurring myth into living. His writing takes cues equally from the musical poetics of Yusef Komunyakaa and from flawless carpenters of the spit verse like Atmosphere and Aesop Rock.
“Book Of” stands out as a glimpse into the logic of the link between WordSmith’s crew and his process of composition. Central to the album, the track articulates the strength of WordSmith’s ability to rep friendship and interiority and to twist them around in the space made by the beat to see how many ways they can fit together.
The knockout, however, is “Crosses.” Here, WordSmith pushes himself to the limits of his firing speed, his delivery sounding singularly urgent. If the strength of WordSmith’s writing is his ability to speak to the private and the public in each person, then it makes sense that “Crosses” hits like a sacrifice of that balance. In “Crosses,” WordSmith puts his words to work to reach out and maybe to attempt to heal a little. From these two central tracks, Of Mics and Men, spreads out to the endpoints of its lyric wingspan, a solid debut album from a rapper who has the skill and heart to make his rhymes do the best real work that a rap song can do.
- Davy Knittle, Stethoscope Press, 2010
For more on WordSmith click here.
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