Anger unleashed New to the scene, but worthy of notice BY SAM PFEIFLE

It’s always a good sign for a scene when artists you’ve barely heard of start releasing good albums out of the blue. Sure, the faces of Portland’s hip-hop set — A-Frame, Moshe, Bread, Sontiago — delivered solid product in the last year, but that’s what you expected. If they’d done any less, you’d have been disappointed. With Anger, however, who releases his debut Releasing Anger this Thursday opening for Nappy Roots, you’ve got virtually no expectations.

Though he’s been writing rhymes for the past 10 years, and has been full-time in Portland for most of that, he’s really only performed two or three shows. "I haven’t really done too much around here," he admits. "I’m just trying to get my foot in the door, just me and my business partner." That business partner is a producer called Beat Architect, and the two of them have formed Dialectic Records, which is releasing Anger’s album. Of course, Beat Architect lives in Florida (so the label spans the East Coast, you could say), and Anger has actually already played release parties down in Miami.

The album sounds, too, like something that’s been labored over. Anger has been working on it for two years, he says, and that comes through both in the layered arrangements and in the 20 tracks. That’s right, they somehow managed to cram 78 (!) minutes of material onto this debut, and it’s a lot to consume, especially when you consider the dense nature of hip-hop lyrical structure in general. The structure in this case was pioneered by the likes of Dilated Peoples (whatever happened to them?), De La Soul, and Digital Underground, groups that emphasized wordplay, popular-culture references, and a smooth, precise delivery with which Anger largely succeeds. At times, he’s more aggressive, dipping into the gangster of Gang Starr, and he’ll even get a little chingy from time to time, without getting too silly.

If anything, the huge content works against him, however. With so many rhymes, Anger’s tendency toward cliché (one he shares with plenty of MCs) rises to the surface, and lines like "I’m so nice on the mic it’s like tryin’ to battle me twice" start to stand out. You hear him use the table/label rhyme a second time. Three times in the first six songs you get a shit-diaper-toilet-paper reference. Better would have been to cull out the best 10 or 12 tracks here, interesting pieces like "The Rhyme Building," where Anger crafts an interesting house-as-song metaphor, or "Ebeneezar," which opens with a lovely piano lick and enters into a narrative about a player Anger calls out thusly: "You’re a scrooge, Ebeneezar/ When you’re Charles Dickens up in a rich bitch, you fuck her, spend her money, then you leave her."

Now that last line, that’s a fucking classic. Dickens as verb! It’s nuggets like this that make Releasing Anger worth paying attention to, and make Anger a Portland rapper to watch.

Sam Pfeifle can be reached at sam@phx.com

Anger plays a CD-release show, with DJ Kut Kaper on the decks, opening for Nappy Roots, at Asylum, in Portland, on Thursday, March 24. Call (207) 772-8274.