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“I heard ’em say…I was too experimental,” growls Tom Shimura, a.k.a. Lyrics Born, at the opening of this near-perfect party record. Propelled by sweet soul melodies and rumbling funk grooves reminiscent of the Gap Band and the Ohio Players, the loquacious San Francisco Bay Area MC specializes in extreme self-promotion—claiming he’s “better than sex and drugs,” for example—but has so much fun it’s hard to resist his goofy charms. Though LB detours into weightier subjects like mortality (“Whispers”) and racial stereotypes (“Rules Were Meant to Be Broken”), it’s his crunchy, unstoppable beats that will have you coming back for more.
