Justus

One of the most creative hip-hop crews in Arizona, Cut Throat Logic pulls in big, diverse crowds wherever it plays. The members of this group, which was spawned in north Phoenix, know how to work a stage, pumping their fans into a frenzy. The music on Cut Throat Logic's self-titled debut CD runs the gamut, from uplifting to angry, from in-your-face rapping to melodic passages, employing sounds from turntable scratching to strings to piano. The themes of the well-crafted songs range from street life to spirituality. This is a group that clearly isn't interested in parroting anything else on the hip-hop horizon.

- azcentral.com/Arizona Republic

Lots of acts attract fans who wear their hearts on their sleeves. Reuben Khan wears his devotion to Cut Throat Logic on the back of his shaved head.

Emily Piraino
Piss and vinegar: Cut Throat Logic has lots on its mind."Cut Throat Logic is a way of life. That's the only one I need," says an emphatic, enormous Khan, a childhood friend of several members of Cut Throat Logic and occasional bodyguard to the group. The band's name appears in scrawled calligraphy across the back of Khan's cranium

Khan's tribute to his childhood friends is an extreme example of the Valley hip-hop group's effect on its true believers. Cut Throat Logic's unpredictable self-titled debut album should be termed emo-rap for its euphoric bursts of rage, defiance, celebration and melody. It's an energy that's been attracting new fans for most of this decade. Close childhood friends from north central Phoenix and now parents of small children, the group has survived the jolting death of its founder -- the brother of two members -- to become a top local draw. At a time when Valley musicians are fortunate to draw more than 50 people, thanks to an apathetic current for live music, Cut Throat attracts sell-out, balls-out crowds.

"We've been selling out [Wednesday] nights at the Mason Jar for the past year," says Justus "Kated" Olbert, one of the group's three rappers and by far the most volatile. "And they were Thursday nights in the middle of fucking August when that place is like 140 degrees, yo. That shit is ridiculous. It's so stupid hot in there, you don't want to fucking be in there for five minutes. And people are sticking around for four hours." (Michael Manfredi, who owns the Mason Jar, calls Cut Throat as the only local act in town that can sell out his club these days.)

The group is now showing it can transcend the 300-person-capacity Mason Jar. It held a CD release party at the Old Brickhouse Grill in downtown Phoenix on January 24 that, according to that club's owners, attracted nearly 700 people of all stripes -- black, white, Latino, bikers, hippies, thug wanna-bes and nattily dressed yuppies.

"They grind! And they've been grinding for a while," says Ether Bunny, whose group Woodpile was among the Brickhouse show's supporting acts. He doesn't possess Khan's courage in the head-advertising department but wears the letters "CTL" in white paint across his forehead inside the Brickhouse. "Every rapper in this building knows they draw the biggest shows in town.

"This is their motherfuckin' night."

It truly was. At the cavernous club, the air a blend of smoke and heat, Cut Throat Logic performed a blistering set, backed for two-thirds of it by a live band featuring veterans of Dislocated Styles, Soulfly and other local rock bands. The rappers, dressed in tees and muscle shirts with Cut Throat Logic logos, jumped and paced the stage with a forceful energy. When the band closed with a crowd favorite, the spooky, slow-crawling "Battle Cry," a group of young Hispanic men closed their eyes and, like the chorus tells them to do, lifted their fists up to the sky, broken up when Olbert doused the crowd with water.

"We have motivation and passion in our music," says Deonte "Plague" Perry, Cut Throat's chief beatmaker and producer. "We're trying to be original, and they appreciate that. They recognize that."

Even if the results don't always work. Cut Throat Logic is an at-times-awkward 12-song rumble through alternating spiritual and thuggish undertones, out-of-left-field vocal samples and multiple shifts in theme. Starting with an agile scratch from 21-year-old whiz-kid DJ Megadef, album opener "Unexpected" is aptly named. Third rapper Babatunde "Babablunte" Rabouin extracts after-life metaphors out of club dress codes. Perry plays smooth in telling other rappers to "get off my dick," while Olbert grunts about learning from his past.

And that all happens before Patrick Swayze dialogue lifted from the 1989 flop Road House and an abrupt change from swinging strings to looming piano.

Throughout the album, Perry's R&B-influenced beats unite four personalities you might not expect to be part of the same band. Olbert is large, intimidating and white, raised by strict Christian parents -- no television for years, with "bullshit music" like the Beach Boys played regularly at home. After discovering hip-hop through a DC Talk tape bought for him at a Christian bookstore, he spent his adolescence rebelling.

"I was an asshole for a long time, but everyone goes through their phase," says Olbert, 22. Now, as the married father of a daughter named Angelica Faith, he wears his hair in corn rows and tattoos his right arm, chest and back with religious symbolism (the famed Last Supper painting, the words to Romans 6:23 and eventually, he says, part of the Sistine Chapel).

Perry, 23, is shorter, skinnier and much quieter than the others. He spent his high school years learning piano, trumpet, drums and trombo - Phoenix Newtimes