Amalgam
2006
Use Your Confusion
About This Album
In 1996, brothers Kevin "Buddy Slim" and Paul "Breezly Brewin'" Smith, going under the name the Juggaknots, released Clear Blue Skies, a nine-track vinyl-only EP whose title song, which explored ideas of interracial dating through a conversation between a father and a son, set them up as an underground slept-on favorite, and helped to launch the career of MC Breezly Brewin' (his name taken from a cartoon he liked to watch as a child), landing him work with Prince Paul, among others, and helping to secure his title as an underrated MC. Ten years later, the Juggaknots' follow-up (though a version of the EP was reissued in 2003), Use Your Confusion, made its way into fans' hands. Adding sister Peridot, or Queen Herawin, to the mix, Slim and Breeze Brewin' (as he calls himself now) split production duties (previously it had been the former who took care of those), also enlisting help from J-Zone and Oh No, among others, although it is the brothers' work that fits the flow and style of the group the best. Favoring soul samples darkened by minor-keyed live instrumentation, the beats loop concisely around the even, nearly monotonic flow of Breeze (making the nasally Sadat X on "30 Something" sound positively rambunctious) and the similarly styled rhymes of Herawin, who, while she does add a female perspective -- in "Strip Joint," "Movin' the Chains," and "Daddy's Little Girl" -- to the otherwise male-oriented album (and genre), doesn't have the chops of her older brother(s).
Track List (try tracks 2,3,7,8,10,12,13 and 15)

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