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My man Chachi recently sent me a new album from The Toy Box Scholars, a collective representing West Warwick, Rhode Island. The first song that I heard off of the album We Got The Love featured a Tribe Called Quest sample, which turned out to be quite appropriate as The Toy Box Scholars have a very strong Native Tongues vibe to them.
All five of the MCs in the group manage to hold their own, and after listening to them for even a few minutes it's clear that they have been heavily influenced by the hip hop of the early 90's. Toy Box Scholar Dialect, in particular, sounds like he's channeling the Digable Planets when he gets on the mic. Though they don't necessarily break any new ground lyrically, their style of rhyming fits in quite well with the laid back production featured on the album. In an era when seemingly every new rapper is being portrayed as a gangster who just happens to rap, it's a nice change of pace to hear a group spit rhymes just for the sake of MCing. The real star of the show here is producer Studs, though, who laces the album with some great sample-heavy beats, even fitting in a few vinyl scratches here and there (a seemingly lost art in hip hop production).
If you're looking for the next club banger, you might want to look elsewhere. But if you're up for something a little more mellow to bump in your headphones, you should definitely check this album out. Best of all, it's free!
Two songs off of We Got The Love:
Toy Box Scholars - Three Friends
Toy Box Scholars - Tribal Connection (instrumental)
Click here to download the full album (direct link to .zip file)
To hear even more, hit up the Toy Box Scholars' MySpace page. And for more beats from Studs, stop by Basement Flavor.
7/09/2007 8:28:29 PM posted by Fresh