Binary Star
Masters Of The Universe

THE REVIEW

"Ultimately, martial art means honestly expressing yourself. It is easy for me to put on a show, and be cocky so I can show you some really fancy movement. But to express oneself honestly, not lying to oneself, and to express myself honestly enough; that my friend is very hard to do..."

Expressing oneself honestly these days is becoming increasingly difficult, especially in the current musical landscape, which is increasingly saturated with mediocre singers and disposable celebrities who crowd the TV screens only to disappear, predictably, within a few months or years. Fortunately for us and our ears, there remains a handful of artists who, ignoring the business and easy money, continue to produce exceptionally high-quality albums, simply for the enjoyment of music lovers around the world. The Binary Star, namely Senim Silla and The Anonymous, two MCs from Michigan who have been friends since high school, can undoubtedly be included in this select group, as they aim to bring hip hop back to its former glory, in a period where baggy pants, jewelry, and mediocre gangstas seem to dominate.

In 1999, they released their self-produced debut album, "Water World," which soon faded into obscurity due to poor distribution and virtually no advertising. However, undeterred, they decided to rely on an independent label, Subterraneous, and re-released the album a year later, revised and corrected, under the new title Masters Of The Universe. And the result is definitely positive, an imaginary space journey around the universe, where Senim Silla and The Anonymous demonstrate an impressive maturity, almost unimaginable for a debut work.
24 splendid tracks, entirely rapped and produced by them, that, without straying too far from the classic sounds of the genre (upbeat rhythms with well-blended funk and jazz samples), seal a perfect album without any lack of style, which could not have opened the newly started millennium better. .

The themes almost all revolve around the renewal of hip hop through the evolution of the human mindset, an evolution to be achieved not with daring and self-serving experiments, but simply by referring to the past and to genuine values that, nowadays, seem to have been lost. It all begins with the initial, magnificent "Reality Check," a calm introduction where they seem to almost assess the current state of things, and then venture into their journey through the visceral funk of "Slang Blade," "Indie 500," where Binary Star reveals the purposes and objectives of their mission "All we need is beats, and rhymes and go and spark it, as long as we got the Underground, yo, we got a market, I don't need an agent to tell me how to run it, cause my goal's to win the Indy 500...", passing through the true masterpiece of the disc, "Evolution Of Man," with its long introduction summarizing the group's intentions, eventually reaching other sublime moments like "Glen Close," with its magnificent piano loop, the dark and melancholic "Wolfman Jack," and the hard and at times disturbing "One Man Army"..

The mission of these artists, by the end of the listening experience, can definitely be considered accomplished: Master Of The Universe is, indeed, an album that leaves you pleasantly exhausted and that, without particular artifices, simply offers us 70 minutes of great music, a boon in the times of the "MTV Generation," and further proof that there still exist, in the third millennium, artists more interested in producing quality work than in filling their pockets. Binary Star is undoubtedly among them.