Album Of The Week: G-Side Gz II Godz

"Turned the city where I'm from into a mini-Motown," says ST 2 Lettaz on the new G-Side song "Higher." He's right and he's wrong. Five or six years ago, Huntsville, Alabama, the city where G-Side are from, was the toast of the rap internet, a small nowhere town that suddenly seemed to be cranking out great rap music at an alarming rate. It had infrastructure, it had talent, and in the Block Beattaz, it had a production crew whose music put an indelible and identifiable stamp on the music that was coming out of the city. But Huntsville was a very mini-Motown, and the attention didn't last. Huntsville produced a couple of underground rap hits -- Jackie Chain's "Rollin'," 6 Tre G's "Fresh" -- but the people who made those hits never again equaled them, try as they might. And it wasn't like these guys were dominating their city; I know people who lived in Huntsville and had no idea that Important Rap Things were happening in their city. Meanwhile, G-Side, the city's best group, cranked out five very-good-to-staggering albums from 2007 to 2011, deepening and expanding their sound but never, in terms of national prominence, getting anywhere beyond the mid-afternoon set on the third stage of a smaller festival. They were great, they were staying great, and the world never noticed. The news, in 2012, that G-Side were breaking up, lent a certain finality, an oh shit, I guess that's over feeling to the entire Huntsville rap story. (Or, at least it did to me, someone who's never actually been to the city.) But then, a year later, G-Side were back. Any momentum they built up in their early years may have dissipated, and they may have gone through some internal turmoil, but G-Side are still, quietly, one of the greatest rap groups in the world. And Gz II Godz, their return, is a monumental work of grandly woozy Southern rap music. If the world doesn't notice, that's the world's loss.