Dungeon Family: Even In Darkness

Before the 1994 release of OutKast's Southernplayalisticadillacmuzik, Southern hip-hop tended to be ghettoized either as booty music with limited crossover appeal (à la 2 Live Crew) or as psychotic gangsta rap designed to scare suburban parents (à la Geto Boys). But OutKast's debut represented something new, not only for Southern hip-hop, but also for rap music as a whole. Though unmistakably Southern, the album was as sonically and lyrically sophisticated as anything being recorded on either coast. Remarkably, the group evolved with each release, leading up to its world-beating fourth album Stankonia, the culmination of everything toward which OutKast and its extended family had worked. Building on Stankonia's massive success, Even In Darkness marks the outstanding debut of Dungeon Family, a tight-knit collection of underrated Southern MCs and producers led by OutKast, Goodie Mob, and super-producer Rico Wade of Organized Noize. Even In Darkness opens with three songs that measure up to anything on Stankonia: "Crooked Booty" mutates gospel, funk, and soul into some of the weirdest, funkiest dance music ever created, while "Follow The Light" shifts gears without losing a step and "Trans DF Express" pays joyous tribute to Afrika Bambaataa's "Planet Rock" and the synthesizer symphonies of Kraftwerk. The rest of the disc only occasionally reaches the highs of its first three songs, but even at its weakest, Even In Darkness roars with vitality. Unsurprisingly, OutKast golden boys Andre 3000 and Big Boi dominate the disc, but they're nearly eclipsed by the demented street gospel of Cee Lo and newcomer Backbone, whose lazy back-porch drawl slips and slides with deceptive craft and precision. "Trans DF Express," "6 Minutes (Dungeon Family It's On)," and "What Is Rap" pay homage to hip-hop's past, but the disc's sound and spacey aesthetic is anything but regressive. Even In Darkness is the sound of the past and the present riding the Trans DF Express into a glorious future that George Clinton would be proud to call home.