Deepspace 5 is a supergroup composed of members from Mars ILL, ill harmonics, Tunnel Rats, Circumsised Mind, The Pride, Labklik and Phonetic Composition. As the liner notes explain, they all got together for a week in Playdough's two-bedroom apartment and knocked this album out in a week, which I can only take as a testament to what happens when hungry, inspired artists get together with their heads right for a project. So what exactly do you think of when you hear "Christian music"? Does "stomach-churning treacley pop" come to mind? Cheezy organs everywhere? Awful watered-down country-tinged garbage? Disposable faceless tripe like Creed or whoever the flavor of the month is? "Inspirational" lyrics that flat-out make my skin crawl I imagine to be par for the course... but somehow Deepsace 5 are classified as Christian music and frankly, this throws me for as big of a loop as hearing Christian black metal (as if Christian death metal wasn't enough of a contradiction in terms) for the first time did. Frankly, I'm still scratching my head a bit trying to figure out exactly how this is Christian rap. There's no corny "giving praise to the man upstairs" and, outside of "Ziontific", a song with a nice Morricone-ish mariachi hook to it that vaguely reads like an interpretation of some Biblical stories, there's nothing here that you're going to trip over and say "Yeah! That! That's totally Christian!" There's just nothing contrived and preachy to be found. I don't know... maybe it's lines like "Jehovah's living water/ but you got a broken cup/ and you filled it up with latte/ and you're sitting at a Starbucks/ purchased peace of mind/ but can't spare poverty a dime" on "Winter in Manhattan"? Later in the track, Sev Statik calls out Puffy: "I ain't sayin no names/ cause the truth can get me blackballed/ but it's ungodly to be faking/ and bite off Biggie Smalls"? There's lines like "they want life without the loss/ they want Christ without the cross" on "This Curse I Bear", but alongside other lines like "I don't bother writing flows/ about clothes and cars/ record sales/ is not a measure of how dope you are/ I guess knowledge is what separates us from them/ I'd rather stuff a page/ then beat it down with my pen" it just flows right. The production is a little hot and cold: when it's on, it's spine-cracking and when it's not on... it still ain't half-bad. Beat Rabbi and Dust are the two stand-out producers on the album. On "Stick This In Your Ear", Beat Rabbi comes with a beat that features a funky flute that sounds an awful lot like something that that other band with a 5 in their name would produce. For "Thinking By Numbers", he comes across with a Premonition-era Amon Tobin-ish beat; it's a little dark, a little kitchen sink, but it's got a nice film noir-y jazz vibe to it. For his part, Dust tears it up too. "The Night We Called It A Day" and "This Curse I Bear" (the stand-out track on the album) are two bona fide bangers, but he does slip up a little on "F-Words", a track that just sort of sounds like an ill-planned, off-kilter take-off of Blackalicious' "A2G" and again on "Murder Creek", with its bassoon hook. This is just nit-picking: throughout, the beats are solid, with nice drum breaks (check "The Night We Called It A Day" and see how Dust manages to effortlessly work in vinyl clicks and pops as a backbeat) and catchy acoustic guitar hooks with a bit of the hot woodwind action. It's impressive that in a group with so much talent, no one really gets dragged behind. Sure, the Listener doesn't exactly tear it up as often Soul Heir and Sintax (in his limited mic time) do, but he delivers big-time on "Closed Caption", a skit where he translates a freestyle for MC Fong... a deaf MC ("oh... he just made an obscene gesture... I'm not really feeling that... we'll have to bleep that out later"). Even the freestyles thrown on at the ends of tracks are impressive. Really, everything about this album is impressive. It starts strong and stays strong throughout. The skit is actually funny and I don't find myself skipping songs throughout. There's a few so-so verses, a few so-so beats but if they didn't have to stand next to such hot tracks and verses, even the so-so would still probably look damned good. So as long as I'm asking questions, I'll throw one last rhetorical one out there: why is Deepspace 5 doing their thing in relative obscurity when I can flip on MTV and see Jurassic 5? - jesus x. lovejones