Early Atoms Family Appearances Week, Day 2: Blatantly Weightless

Most people who read this blog would be familiar with Weightless Recordings, right?  Actually, looking at my "Find Posts About..." column, I'm surprised I never blogged about at least Illogic before.  Although, I suppose if any you've really been with me for the long haul, I did write about them for The Source way back when.  But real quick, just in case, Weightless Recordings is the official label of Ohio underground family of Greenhouse Effect, Iskabibbles, Blueprint, Zero Star... a lot of the groups are same guys kinda shuffled around.  Like Blueprint is a member of Greenhouse and Iskabibbles as well as having plenty of solo albums, being a part of The Orphanage, etc.  You have to get really dug into them as a fan to sort it all out, but in short it's a small but strong collective of underground Ohio MCs who've been in the game a long time now.  Because yeah, they're still doing it.  Illogic and Blueprint put out new albums on Weightless as recently as last year.  Blueprint's was on vinyl.

And this is an early album from them, called B-Sides Volume 1: Blatant Battle Raps released in 2001.  There never was a Volume 2.  The concept is explain on the inside cover, "[t]his is a collection of songs that we probably would've never put out for one reason or another.  Some were done without any project in mind, others belonged to side-projects that got put on the back burner.  Nevertheless, we've been enjoying them ourselves for a while a[sic.] figured you might also get a kick out of them."  The liner notes also promise an Iskabibbles LP that never happened.

So yeah, it's a nice collection of otherwise unreleased songs by the whole family.  There's only one group of outside artists on here, and if you've read this post's title, you know who that'll be.  There's a big posse cut with The Atoms Family called "Pen Relays" on here.  The full line-up of MCs on this track is Cryptic One, Alaska, Windnbreeze, Vast Aire, Blueprint and Inkwel.  Cryptic also produced the track.  And it's easily one of the most exciting moments on the album, if only by virtue of it being the big posse cut.  Like Day 1's entry (and you'll note: Greenhouse Effect were on that album, too), it's another one that clocks in at over 7 minutes, with each MC just trying to showcase their skills as best they can over an atmospheric, industrial-sounding track.

Despite the subtitle of the album, we're not really getting battle raps here.  Well, maybe a little bit of it is.  It's actually a strange mix of mind-bending imagery meshed with seriously extended metaphors for basic skill flexing ("see me at the back of the class, 101 iconoclast, making all of my professors laugh. Who knows what evil lurks in the ugly hearts of men?  I throw darts at men, tips dipped in carcinogen.  I raise cities out of bottomless pits.  Man, it's all in the wrists.  I can tell a snake by the lisp, because MCs are pathetic"), along with the occasional, perfunctory corny punchline ("me and the mic's best friends like Blossom and Six").  Yeah, it feels a little dated and the punchlines definitely sell the rest of the material short, but overall it's still an impressive display of lyrical prowess sixteen years later.

Then the Fam comes back for an encore on the very last track of the album, a freestyle "Live From Time Travel Radio (Chicago, IL)."  This time we've got Cryptic, Alaska, Vast and Vordul alongside the Iskabibbles crew.  At least that's what's listed on the track-listing.  It gets a little confusing because it lists twelve songs, including Interludes, but the CD is broken up into 25 tracks.  Most of the extra tracks are these very short freestyle snippets, plus an dope unlisted bonus track at the end called "Sun Rise" by Blueprint and somebody named Shabazz of The Commandos.  But there's eight tracks between the last song and the bonus song, and it's not entirely if they're all from the Time Travel Radio session or just other bonus freestyles they're sticking on the CD.  Some obviously are part of the Time Travel bit, because they feature Atoms Family members, but track 20, for instance, could really go either way.  They really do make this album feel like a collection of scraps.

Anyway, it's a bunch of fun freestyles.  There are some surprising punchlines in there ("you're wack like Nas is now"), and you can feel that a lot of these are entirely off the head, while others are more prewritten.  The tracks are very "scrappy," in that we sometimes jump in or out in in the middle of an MC's verse.  Overall, it's cool if you take it as a bonus; but none of it packs half the value of "Pen Relays."  That's the song that's going to really please Atoms fans.  ...And Weightless fans, too, of course.  If you're into these guys, this is a solid album for your collection.  Illogic's got a couple tight tracks, and there's a cool remix of Greenhouse's song from the Foolblown compilation.

This CD was later released with full color artwork of The Thing fighting The Hulk, but I've got the original, scrappy black & white release.  Looking on discogs, the repress has the same track-listing, but I'm not sure if it has all the little bonus filler cuts.