below the heavens

blu & exile.

If you're not listening, you're missing.

The key to listening? Blues in Exile. Because that's what this album is. It is the blues screened through today's landscape. The beats drip soul, the lyrics are about pain and struggle and overcoming. The lyrics work on level after level and are applicable to your life, even though you're not a struggling young black dude from no where. Unless you are.

The universality of the sentiments is the key to the blues. There is pain and there is hate in the blues. But not the hate that cannot be overcome, unless you're John Lee Hooker, of course... but he's bad like Jesse James. But the struggle and the power to lift yourself up is something incredible that Blu shares. It resonates with the viewer, and the backdrops painted by Exile match perfectly.

The most amazing trick is without question the fact that though this music is the blues, it makes you feel like the sun is shining down on you. It is truly music born of the never-ending sunshine of the city of angels (though the stranger "didn't find it to be that, exactly.") that admits that the sun alone doesn't make everything is perfect.

Anyway, the music is fantastic. The lyrics are powerful, direct, relevant and elegant. This album is already a classic. Buy it.