Album Review: Rice Alum's "Mixmaster"

Anthony Kellems likens his debut rap album, Mixmaster, to a basketball game: It starts with a pregame forecast in which announcers discuss the forthcoming album’s potential. The record is then split into two distinct sides representing halves of a basketball game, separated by a heavy metal guitar solo “halftime show”- and the back-and-forth, slow- and fast-paced tempo changes in Kellems’ verses evoke the ebb and flow of the game. Don’t be fooled, though – this is no tight concept album, a la Kendrick Lamar’s good kid, m.A.A.d. city. Instead, it is a loosely connected series of upstart and rambunctious rap tracks that solidify the Rice alumnus (Hanszen ’05, M.A. ’07, Ph.D. ’10) as one of the genre’s foremost Christian rappers. However, while God is consistently present on the record, it is done in a way that asks more questions than provides answers.