Scotty Hard: The Return Of Kill Dog E/MC Paul Barman: It's Very Stimulating (Wordsound)

ANYONE DISILLUSIONED with rap should cock an ear to the sounds leaking out from under the bunker doors of Brooklyn's Wordsound collective. The Crooklyn crew must be on a millennial roll — or some kinda anti-Prozac they've cooked up in the lab — because here come two more releases that could restore anyone's faith that HipHop is "sturdy like Lazarus". You couldn't get two testaments more Artic/Antartic than The Return of Kill Dog E and It's Very Stimulating, but in their divergent ways both invoke rap's late-80s hi- top days: the Dog playing bad cop to Barman's Daisy Age fruitloop; they both emphatically restore deep headbop vibrations — Dog sonically, Barman lyrically — to the Game.