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This debut from local MC Sworz and Sluggerz Entertainment casts a skeptical but acutely observant eye over everyday life. Sonically, Da Inevitable is raw and blunt—woofer-wiggling 4/4 beats and just a little bit of retro keyboard squeaking to widen the sound. It’s a complementary backdrop for Sworz’s gruff, mouthful delivery, full of fast-dropped round vowels and clipped consonants that action-paint scenes. In “Makin’ Do,” Sworz’s narrator talks about doing “guns and drugs” and even a “little shoplifting,” but that he’s “gotta find a better way to put food on my table,” that he’s just “out in the streets just trying to make due” and trying not to fall in with the “fat-money” crowd. While the anti-thug spiels are one-dimensional and sometimes bizarre—rhyming “breasteses” with “messages” in the booty-call slow jam “Call You” is either pure comic genius or just plain creepy—Sworz exudes enough personality to keep Inevitable’s unsophisticated ride from stalling. And, actually, Sworz is at his most interesting when the beats are bargain basement. “Early in the Morning” is a codeine-slow stroll that sounds pre-screwed-and-chopped, over which Sworz leisurely barks his day-in-the-life-of-a-hustler portrait, and it’s a head-nodding, ear-grabbing action-flick. Elsewhere, early-’80s keys add a weirdly menacing mood to “Jealousy,” and a canned funky-break skitters through the jittery—if, like too much of the album, routinely misogynistic—kiss-off “No Love."

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