Hip-hop underground lords Str8Buttah are going through something of an image overhaul.

Originally a crew of the gnarliest, battle-hardened MC’s in Lagos and their boom bap production partners, the collective has added a softer touch in the past few months.

In Maka, they now have a bonafide soul singer who may be tomboyish in looks but supple in sound, while in Phlow they have a female rapper who mixes hard and soft with grit and grace.

To adopt a rap name that’s also a rap technique, Phlow seems to be aware of the things that she can do with the microphone. Let’s hope that her first EP Mind Body and Phlow doesn’t expose too many of the things that she can’t.

The EP starts off by sampling a scene from the TV series Daredevil, “the mind controls the body, the body controls our enemies, our enemies control jack sh*t.” That’s her attitude, the rapper truly believes her enemies are powerless and on “Looking at Nobody” she barely even acknowledges any of them.

It’s about time they had dust to bite /
Competition’s pale, you know I dust ‘em, right?

There’s a confidence in her delivery that resonates as her voice bounces aggressively against the baseline, slightly reminiscent of Kel in her prime.  She brings some of that aggression to “Reputation”, with a sample from Jay Z’s “Where I’m From” taking the pounding. For the remix however she picked a softer sample, Johnny Osborne’s “In Your Eyes”, extracting a classic one drop rhythm to test her skills with. The rhymes aren’t always the most complicated –

Now I just let the beat play /
I bet I will slay /
cause I don’t really care what they say

And the vocals aren’t always immediately intelligible, which is a little disappointing for an alumni of the Hennessy VS Class (Lyricist Edition), but at least she’s almost always engaging. I say almost always because when the young rapper talks about affairs of the heart, the results aren’t quite as assured. She gets lost behind Maka’s voice on“The Final One”, unable to deliver her raps with the kind of emotion required to discuss break-ups and make-ups. “Reminder” is more believable but sometimes Phlow is guilty of getting carried away with sounding good that she overlooks sounding right, grammatically.

“I ain’t the one to judge a cover by the book”.

Oshey, reverse idioms.

In rhyming over interpolated classic samples and having the tact to treat them with the respect they deserve, Tekzilla’s influences are evident all over this EP. But not in a puppet-master kind of way, more like a master and his young apprentice and based on this evidence, the apprentice is learning.

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