David Banner's latest is WORTH IT!! Not so Decemberists, Third Day, Underoath, and maybe Taylor Swift I'm not sure.

"I go baaaaack to December all the time..."

Or so sez Sheep & Goats at the Burnside Writers' Collective.  Here's the Banner review, but you'll have to go there for the Goats (Decemberists, Third Day, Underoath), the Soul Searching (Taylor Swift), and the featured single, Brooke Fraser's "Something In the Water".

David Banner & 9th Wonder
Death of a Pop Star
(b.i.G.f.a.c.e./eOne)

I’ve been wondering if David Banner could become the snarling face of popular Christian rap, so this collaboration with producer 9th Wonder is one answer:  probably not, but holy cow, it works for me.  Normally Banner comes off like a smarter, southerner DMX, kicking against the extremes of offensiveness and godliness, barking out sex and b-words and n-words and hating himself on Sunday mornings.  So if he’s toned it down for this album whose first credit is “Spiritual Producer: God”, you still probably don’t wanna play it in church.  It closes with a titty joke, for instance.

In the best song, Banner prays that he might lead his people to “The Light” over a slinky funk bounce built of barks and grunts.  He starts the soulful “Slow Down” talking smack to a stripper, and ends up humanizing her — not in any real deep way, but we learn she’s a single mom working two jobs, which is more than you’d get from the Ying Yang Twins.  Banner can also sound idiotic — he equates rappers trying to sing with “preachers touchin’ the kids”, and attributes homosexuality to rape-by-stepfather.  But that hardly makes him the first Christian blowhard, and anyway, he can rap rings around most such yaks, burrowing deep into 9th Wonder’s inspired grooves.  It’s a confounding possibility for what Christian rap can be:  dope, spiritually naked, socially perceptive, occasionally stupid and offensive.  And hey — if Ludacris wants to offer a hilarious sex rap instead of a testimony, at least Banner got him in the door.