By Kyle Auger

Staff Writer

Lupe Fiasco’s new CD Lasers is a great album that was just released March 8th and I instantly enjoyed the new style.

On the album, my personal favorite was “Words I Never Said” and “ State Run Radio” although their styles are deeply contrasting; I love the beat and pace of “State Run Radio”. The only song I didn’t enjoy was “Out of My Head” featuring Trey Songz.

At first listen, I instantly connected the CD to a lot of recently released albums. The choruses have their roots in techno and auto-tone. This new phase in rap was popularized by Kanye West’s CD My Beautiful Dark Twisted Fantasy and I loved both.

Although a lot of the songs are more focused on the beats and choruses, Lupe Fiasco showed no rust from his break from music as most of his raps were executed perfectly with creative lines.

Another way Lupe is clearly changing to adapt to popular hip-hop is his rhymes were based on a lot of politics and current events. Specifically in the song “Words I Never Said” featuring Skylar Grey, he takes swings at various politicians including Rush Limbaugh and Glen Beck.

Throughout the CD there are various artists featured in the songs and they added their personal touches. Most of these artists are young and up in coming including Skylar Grey, MDMA, and Matt Mahaffey. Although most of these artists aren’t proven yet, I believe their roles were played perfectly. Even though most of the featuring artists were young, various established artists including John Legend and Trey Songz were involved.

The album is expected to gross 220,000 copies and will probably end the week at number one on the sales list. These sales will give Fiasco momentum towards his next album that he is under contract to produce.

The way I judge whether a CD is good or not is if I was listening to it in the car, and how many songs would I skip? When this rule is applied to Lasers only one song would be skipped, a testament to the quality of the album.