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Williams said in an interview that he was trying to write 'songs' this time rather than setting poetry to music. In a few places this is blatantly not what happened, such as the album's overture "Talk To Strangers", a poem read calmly over iffy ambient music. The rest of the tracks are more clearly conceived of as songs, but not always structured that way, as Williams builds pressure over the course of the whole track instead of letting everything out in the chorus.
The standouts are next to each other in the middle of the record, and about as different as possible. "African Student Movement" calls back to the verbal style of Williams' classic manifesto "Coded Language", whose climax was (just) a list of names read with increasing urgency. Okay, list poems can be lazy. This one is not; the simplicity of the unexplained juxtapositions tie it together exactly as it needs, as do the slow dancehall beat and Williams' murmured repetition of "tell me where my niggas at". Right after it comes "Black Stacey", songlike and autobiographical.
I keep expecting Williams to sound like he did on "Twice The First Time" (RealAudio link to, frustratingly, only the first half of the song). That isn't where he's headed; "Twice" talked about removing the urban element from hip-hop, and it did, but that isn't Williams's whole mission.
Like Tricky and Mos Def, Saul Williams sees the idea of rap-rock as something worth saving from the mob of goons that have it now. His idiosyncratic self-production makes a better case for it than Tricky's, I think. (Haven't heard any of Mos Def's experiments in that vein, just read that he tried.) There's power in that brutal guitar screech. Still, I prefer his even stranger effects, like the Radiohead woob-woob noise in "African Student Movement".
Anyway, I like this record. Can't tell yet how much.
If you want to hear the least typical track, Matthew Perpetua has blogged "Grippo" over at FluxBlog.
