He pours vocal suavity into those songs, and the backup tracks are elegantly lush yet restrained.
Although these four sisters have been making gospel albums since the 1970s, they keep up with pop production styles, and the backup tracks on "Family Christmas," a live album, gleam with synthesizer tones.
EASY TARGET OF THE YEAR -- Check for the bull's-eye on Eminem, the fast-rapping, self-loathing misanthrope with the violent imagination and the bouncy backup tracks.
They're also determined to sidestep the slick backup tracks and formulaic boasts about guns, girls and material goods that now dominate more commercial hip-hop, though they haven't exactly turned into feminists.
"Joe Budden" (Def Jam), the debut album by this rapper from Jersey City, animates the standard sequence of intro, old-school memories, denunciation of pretenders, crime sagas and the flaunting of status and virility with a quick-tongued mixture of ambivalence and one-upmanship, while dense backup tracks jump with sampled horns and strings.
With stark minor-key backup tracks, Swizz Beatz and DMX's other producers make DMX sound solitary and cornered; the only bit of lightness was "Good Girls, Bad Guys," a teasing dialogue with the female duo Dyme.
He spews syllables with the speed and syncopation of a jazz singer over backup tracks evoking 1970's soul.
RZA's stark, ominous backup tracks -- minor-key samples and wordless, melancholy voices -- connote a grim universe of mistrust, solitude and desolation.
"The Biggest Rhythms" (Greensleeves) collects the backup tracks that dancehall toasters have rapped over and hip-hop producers have latched on to: stripped-down exotica, parched two-beats, less-is-more abstractions and twitchy, twangy, perforated funk.
When the backup tracks ended, songs stopped dead.
But her set was undermined by anemic volume and by how many of its elements are prerecorded; the songs stopped dead when the backup tracks ended.
