A decade retrospective of Santos’ prolific and diverse musical career, one can hear some of Ital’s best productions along with the obvious and often dramatic development of many of his I.E. compatriots that appear on the 10 year saga of an album. The older tracks bristling with a little more trigger-happiness and aggressive masculinity. Their

A decade retrospective of Santos’ prolific and diverse musical career, one can hear some of Ital’s best productions along with the obvious and often dramatic development of many of his I.E. compatriots that appear on the 10 year saga of an album. The older tracks bristling with a little more trigger-happiness and aggressive masculinity. Their pre-track shout outs sound Death Row-style and Yasin, a frequent Santos collaborator on the earlier works, throws down hard bars over powerful and grimy boom-bap. The later tracks are more chill and even stoner-hippie in their wizened observations and wisdom. Noted posi-gawds like Noa James show their earlier more gangster side on older tracks from the collection too. Ital Santos’ musical tastes reflect the larger culture’s shifts; here is a musician who has been here for all many phases. Songs in between like an addictive R & B number, "Black Brown Soul Revue" sung amazingly by CornBreeze near the end help show Ital’s diversity and vision. Santos shows us his part in local lexicon development with tracks like “the 9”, and the collection’s standout almost-closer “The Realest Shit I Ever Wrote” on which he says "I got friends but sometimes I feel alone." The whole song is a bluesy soul slapper which encapsulates, I think, Ital's desire to shed light on the struggle of people in the I.E. This record commemorates a decade of him doing exactly that, through different collaborators, different eras and personas of the self, just trying to give the I.E. the kind of musical shading and texture so many other hard-up communities have had in the past. He's been busy in this last decade and I look forward to what he produces next.