Audition, the newest release from the artist P.O.S., is less concerned with lush instrumentation and pretty compositions than it is with the release of pure, raw emotion. Titles like “Half-cocked Concepts,” “Stand Up (Let’s Get Murdered),” “Bush League Psyche-Out Stuff,” “Safety in Speed (Heavy Metal),” and “Suicide Uma Schrantz”–as well as the track “P.O.S. is Ruining My Life”–suggest the direction the album is going in.
Appearances by Slug (“Bush League…”), Craig Finn, Greg Attonito, and the Doomtree family, only serve to highlight this very personal dissertation by one of rap’s rising stars.
“De La Souls” slows things down slightly, as P.O.S. gets introspective for a semi-autobiographical account of his life thus far. The warehouse drums and water-logged bassline, however, continue to emit the same rawness and earnest of the more hyper kinetic tracks. Paul Kersey to Jack Kimball, on the other hand, hits like early Eminem—this is Slim hyped up on purple pills with something important to say. But don’t look to make arbitrary comparisons; P.O.S. is nothing if not original. And this album, though a little more polished than his first, is still crude, honest and simple; stripped down and cut straight to the gristle. A record that deserves multiple listens to get to the center.
This is not an album for rap fans; it is an album for adrenaline fans. People looking for something to inject into the bloodstream and stimulate the cranial corpuscles. P.O.S. might be coming to ruin your life, but his audition is still worth a call back.
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