Backland - This Is Me (Block Boy Music)

Backland has been one of the best rappers in Baltimore since the 90's and has maintained that position even though a car accident took him out of the game for a couple years there. But this is his second CD after his comeback, just a year after Back In Business, and he's still better than most of the other MC's out here. Backland was working the door at 5 Seasons last time I was there and handed me a copy of this as I was leaving, thanks to him for that. You can download the whole mixtape for free on the mixtape site Datpiff.com, and I love seeing Bmore artists on that site, that's a tool that a lot more people could be taking advantage of. There's guest appearances from Stackz, B.O.M.B., D. Davis, Mr. Wilson from JI-900 and others. A whole lot of Backland's appearances on 106 & Park's Freestyle Fridays used to be on YouTube, but Viacom are a real bitch about shutting down any videos of their shows and took most of them down. Someone uploaded this one pretty recently, though, peep it before they catch it.

Backland f/ Huli Shallone - "Off My Block" (mp3)
This sounds more like a Huli Shallone song than a Backland song, production-wise, but Backland kills his verse. I haven't heard much from Huli lately, does he have anything new out? There was a rumor going around a few months ago that Huli had signed to Universal Records, but his official MySpace page (there were a lot of other pages by people impersonating him before he finally got on MySpace himself) still lists his label as "unsigned."

Labels: B.O.M.B., Backland, Huli Shallone, mixtape/album review, mp3