Everybody gets into Hip-Hop for his or her own certain reasons, some are purely in it for the financial gain, and that’s fine. While others enter the culture with a total opposite agenda that includes restoring an art form that has faltered over the years—and the Seattle duo of Common Market are on the latter end of the spectrum.

Consisting of mouthpiece RA Scion and producer Sabzi, they come together to form Tobacco Road; a project filled with complex lyrical deliveries and production that charms the ear. Songs like ‘Slow Cure’ are suggestive to Mic Geronimo’s ‘Masta I.C.’ (who they coincidently use a voice sample of).

On ‘Gol’Dust,’ Sabzi uses epic horns that an orchestra would utilize to announce the arrival of a royal family entering a room, and RA Scion follows it up with material like, “Y’all know the prophecy if biblical from hill to hill/in between Beacon and Capital I travel at will/recreate the Normandy site/deploy/you appreciate the enormity right.”
 
‘Back Home (The Return)’ doesn’t drop off one bit, as RA Scion continues on with his rapid-fire vocabulary that doesn’t include senseless curse words. ‘Trouble Is’ incorporates organ samples, that blend in perfectly with the message at hand. ‘40 Furrows’ is probably the most basic song on the album; meaning that the production isn’t as sharp as its predecessors, but the vibe it brings is still a positive one, as it fits right in with the theme of the album.

On ‘House,’ RA unleashes a lyrical barrage backed by jazzy guitar strings, and the song itself will have you wondering how he manages to catch his breath in between lines. Sabzi slows things done on ‘Weather Vane,’ and RA Scion equally slows up his machine-gun like dialect giving the listener ample opportunity to fully digest his content. 

Other songs like ‘Nina Sing,’ ’40 Acres,’ and ‘Certitude’ do nothing but tie into an already well put together project that has the right combination of beats and rhymes, (the basic components of Hip-Hop). Although this particular brand of Hip-Hop will probably go unnoticed as far as the general public is concerned, it’s a safe bet that the people who are in search of it will have no trouble finding what they set out for, as long as groups like Common Market are around.