Hailing for Orlando, FL, Sol.iLLaquists of Sound is what a hip hop band should be. With four members (Swamburger, Alexandrah, Tonya Combs, and DiViNCi) this group intertwines live instrumentation, intelligent lyrics, a fiery delivery, and harmonic singing into songs that range from entertaining stories to commentative pieces about the current state of the world. Their sound really cannot be compared to any other artist, as their style of instrumentation follows no formula, creating songs that either display a vivid understanding of music or lay the foundation for simple and pure boom-bap. The musical influences appear to come from jazz, soul, electronica/techno/or whatever the genre title would be for the futuristic, synthetic and digital sound that Afrika Bambaataa was know for, and, of course, rap music. The vocal style used by the Sol.iLLaquists of Sound bounces from rapid-fire raps, soulful singing, and dramatic bursts of spoken word poetry. In essence, S.O.S. is a musical melting pot. With a number of tracks that display their musical virtue, “2nd Nature” is just one example.Instrumentally, “2nd Nature” is one of their songs that have a simple instrumental that creates a steady soundscape for their creative lyricism. The clean sounding snare hit, steady bass drum and the supportive, rather than overpowering, hi-hat gives the instrumental a nice backbone to grow off of. Repeated chords and note thumping of an electric piano (which sounds like a Rhodes), with the accompaniment of the bassline, fills the track. What is real nice with the instrumentation is that it drops out on the third bar creating a place for the musicians to “breath”; which, from listening to the how the verses are structures and the adlibbing session at the end of the track, seems to be the concept of the sound: be hot, but do not over do it.

The verses are dope on two levels: the delivery and the structure in which they are presented. The former refers to the fast tongues of the emcees. They spit so fast that at times one might believe that they may lose the beat, but they never do. The dichotomy within the song is created as the singing slows the delivery. The rapping to singing seesaw occurs throughout the jam. Contrary to popular assumption, the singing is its own entity, there is not hook. This leads into the second aspect of this song: the structure of the song. Unlike traditional rap jams that follow the 16-bar-verse-four-bar-hook, “2nd Nature” comes of unconventional. The rap bars-to-singing bars “ratio” goes, respectively, 10-2-4-4-10-4-6-4-4-4/16/16 (the last 36 bars go back and forth from female to male to female vocalists). This make the song unique because the listener is given a break form the emcees’ eat-the-mic approach to rapping; most rappers rather give you the whole 16, 24 or however many bars, and, in some cases, the listener can get physically weary just from listening. The song’s concept becomes clear as the concluding adlibs lament that emcees keep “spitting, and spitting, and spitting…” and they need to break there songs up, suggesting it occurs through singing as “2nd Nature” illustrates.

Overall, Sol.iLLaquists of Sound is one of the few hip hop groups that are taking the art of music to the next level, or at least where rap music should be. And since they are a live band, they should be dope to see live, so they are worth the check out.

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