CHINO XL “Here to Save You All”...

CHINO XL “Here to Save You All” *** 1/2 American Recordings

“Did he really say that?” That will be a common first reaction to hearing Chino XL, rap’s equivalent of Howard Stern. The 23-year-old New Jersey native shoots his mouth off for the same reason Martin Scorsese put someone’s head in a vise in “Casino”--pure visceral effect. One of the tamer examples, from the song “Deliver”: “Avoid battling me like I’m Eazy-E blood samples.”

The shock value would be a wash without talent to back it up. The best songs don’t involve punch lines at all, instead leaning toward introspection. “Creep” (about a personal relationship gone wrong), “Who Am I” (a narrative about the artist’s mixed heritage) and the breathtakingly visual “Rise” (a verbal retelling of the movie “The Crow”) show that he’s just as much a visual artist as he is a verbal iconoclast.

“Here to Save You All” rings true. Chino XL returns to some of the bold, freewheeling, brutally honest elements that have been missing in the money-hungry, over-commercialized genre, and he does it without fear of what it will do to his standing among his rap peers or in the commercial marketplace. Fearlessness with the microphone, not the gun, brings his talent--and his genre--full circle.

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