The Good Sin

The Good Sin and 10.4 Rog just released a video for "The Crown," a standout tracks from their excellent Late album released way back in February. The shots of sunny LA are enough to make you want to leave this Northwest gloom immediately, but if you lack the means, disposable income, and private jet like I do, just revisit this song and the rest of Late, one of the strongest local hiphop releases of 2011, as you shine (not grind) today.
- The Stranger - Mike Ramos

The Good Sin & 10.4 Rog release the final video off their collaborative album Late. Wanting to show his appreciation Sin finds a new way to innovate the cameo as you’ll see in this instant classic. As a thank you to those who’ve supported their music, they present “All For You”. - Pot Holes In My Blog

Much of last night was spent listening to The Good Sin/10.4 Rog collaboration called Late. The work has many pleasures. There are, for one, the details in 10.4 Rog's beats. From a distance, the tracks sound simple and clear. When up close, you find in each track an active microworld of slides, shifts, and shimmering substructures. The Good Sin's rap style is another pleasure; it recalls that of Tha Rockness Monstah, the star of the 90s crew Heltah Skeltah. But The Good Sin's deep and heavy voice has none of the aggression and menace of Tha Rockness Monstah. Good is the type of rapper who, like Geo, prefers to keep a cool head out of the clouds. He is in essence a working-class rapper. Not gang bangers but heartless bosses bring grief and stress to his everyday world. - The Stranger - Charles Mudede

Central District brothers The Good Sin and Sean Symphony are the Fasolt and Fafner of the local rap game, nine foot tall giants you might have seen at this or that concert around town.

Seriously, though, they're tall.

The Good Sin's been working with Renton jazz/rap/other producer 10.4 Rog on an album called "Late," and this song didn't make the cut for whatever reason. Rog's composition is beautiful, with a halting bass line creating a little herky-jerk rhythm underneath sonar drone and soothing space bleeps that bubble skyward.

"Given" is the first time I've heard The Good Sin rap on a song with his brother Sean singing the hook, and they make a great team, thoughtful raps and straightforward vocals, neither one trying too hard. Hyphn8td Hyphen8d (I think that's how you spell it) from area group State of the Artist raps perhaps the first verse I've ever liked from him, an ode to monogamy — "ball together or fall together/ it's all whatever / I'm all in." Toward the end of his verse, Rog takes a synth note and bends it into a severe splatter sound, then just lets it hang there, taking up space and eventually drifting off. Somehow, it is the perfect thing to do. - Seattle Times

Can’t front on Sin‘s choice on beats, or Sin himself, even if I know a couple a y’all did at first. I anticipate good things from his Late project with the massively great 10.4 Rog, much like with the other local release I’m really anticipating—the one that TH and my other favorite young producer in town, Tay Sean, are doing together. Sin and TH get it in, dropping mellow jewels over the ebb of Karmatic‘s twinkly nod (looks like they found each other via the internets); in my iTunes the track sounds great going into ”Given”, the Rog-laced wash of cosmic energy from September. - Raindrop Hustla

Seattle hip-hop is so full of note-worthy releases this year that a lot of good projects have fallen victim to internet attention spans. Producer 10.4 Rog and baby-faced rapper the Good Sin put out a project called Late that was jazzy and far more downtempo than a lot of people would have expected, and for that reason, I loved it. The album didn’t get nearly enough attention as it deserved, but now that there’s a video for the song “Bad About You,” hopefully more people go and revisit Late. - Last Nights Mixtape

After a week of listening to far too much Odd Future than is healthy for one human’s conscience to bear, it was incredibly mollifying on the dome to come across this gem, the 10.4 Rog and The Good Sin collaboration, Late.

Renton’s 10.4 Rog has built a steady rep for creating a diverse array of soundscapes that are influenced in equal parts by J. Dilla’s complex boom-bap and the electronic wanderings of Radiohead. The result of Rog’s genre amalgam trips are progressive, visceral renderings of hip-hop that feel more instinctual than intentionally crafted. Very few producers possess this aptitude which, in the end, isn’t about how nice someone is with Fruity Loops. Folks like 10.4 Rog and oc Notes do this sh-t based on hunches and less on the basis of study.

If Rog’s nine tracks on Late are the result of a naturally occurring head-in-the-hip-hop-clouds faculty, then emcee The Good Sin’s rich baritone is the anchor that keeps the songs tethered to the ground. There’s a brilliant dualism at work here: while the stark contrast in tone between Rog’s atmospheric instrumentals and Sin’s heavy voice is readily apparent, the two also work in perfect unison when Sin occasionally lets his mind and words wander inside the producer’s compositions.

For the most part, Sin is a cat still trying to find his voice, at least contextually. Dude can rap on most anything as his past drops and mixtape (Ready or Not) have shown, but listeners still don’t really know who he is. Late reveals the emcee to be a true poet who is equally comfortable exploring spoken-word’s ambiguous nebula (the album’s opening and closing, “Wake Up” and “Endpiece”) as he is rapping on concrete subjects like getting money and getting over (“Pages & Wages”). The Stranger’s Charles Mudede recently compared Sin’s rap ethos to that of Geo of Blue Scholars because of their similar working-class bearings. The comparison is appropriate in that vein, but Sin also possess a certain poetic now-ness to his style; a lyrical method that blends the esoteric and the concrete. It’s exciting to find that type of complexity in The Good Sin, who was previously most notable for his strong delivery.

Hip-hop is not typically something I listen to when laying in bed trying to go to sleep. While it’s by far my preferred musical genre, most of it is too immediate and glaring to be relaxing. Late is something much different, however. The album can be explored with a full ear attuned to the beats and rhymes, or it can be put on in the background and allowed to seep in little by little. It’s one of those rare pieces of music where my mind didn’t have to make the conscious decision to LIKE or DISLIKE. It just knew from the moment it filtered through.

Late is available for FREE download. Click on the album cover above or the Bandcamp link below.
- 206up.com

How should I unpack Late, a local hiphop album that was released in the middle of February, the last full month of winter? I shall begin with the beginning, which in hiphop always means the beat. Before the rapper, there is the beat; before scratching, the beat. In Late, the beat, which was crafted by the gifted and young 10.4 Rog (Roger Habon), the producer behind THEESatisfaction's masterpiece "Cabin Fever," does not kick or pound or boom. Instead, much of it is composed of soft thuds, quick snaps, and taps with a kiss of dub. The bass has most of the substance and is widely spaced, leaving lots of room for what often amounts to a suggestion of a beat.

As with several of the remixes 10.4 Rog has released over the past two years, the beat on Late is ornamented with delicate dub effects and lightly rippling/meandering keyboards. The result of this mode of production (hinted beats, elegantly elongated bass lines, dreamy echoes, pretty melodies) is a hiphop that's emotionally sensitive. I must now bring up humpity-and-bumpity crunk (a music that has almost no sensitivity) and a local crew called dRED.i. (This digression will hopefully not be a waste of time.) Back in the early '00s, dRED.i came up with the idea to make a revolutionary crunk, a crunk that was politically charged. A crunk that would speak to your mind (rap) and behind (beat). The idea was brilliant, but it didn't catch. Why? It's not that dRED.i lacked talent—the crew had scores. No, it had to do with the fact that the music and content have to be one and the same thing. Revolutionary raps need revolutionary beats. This was indeed the essence of Public Enemy—innovation all around. If, however, the music is regressive, which is the case with crunk, then we cannot expect anything different from the raps. The MC will reflect the condition of the beat. End of digression.


Back to Late, a project that was slowly and carefully developed during the second part of 2010: The sensitivity of the music is reflected in the sensitivity of the rapper, The Good Sin (Kellen Herndon), a 24-year-old man born and raised in Seattle. The Good Sin is never loud or angry, but always at an emotional tempo that encourages thoughtfulness. There are angry thoughts, intellectual thoughts, and thoughtful thoughts—The Good Sin is defiantly about thoughtful thoughts concerning his world (working class), his relationships with women (which tend to be tender), and his spirituality (a kind of experimental theology). There is no meanness in The Good Sin's rhymes, but neither is he simply positive about life. He recognizes the reality of social and historical problems, but he never lets these obstacles cloud or distort his humanism: "I'm counting on the sea view to tranquil the pain I'm having/Hoping love spreads through the year when the hate is happening/But I ain't focused on the negative/It's a blessing to know just how much to give..." ("All for You").

Another digression is in order. Commercial rap usually presents the rapper as the object of indirect desire. What I mean by this: The ideal subject for this kind of rapping is a young man who wants to be the rapper because the rapper has such easy access to so many desirable things, particularly women with big butts and breasts. This is the essence of mainstream rap videos. The rapper is in a world you want to be in, and so the subject of this video and music, you, wants to be the rapper, the one who gets to fuck all of these beautiful and curvy babes and drive all of these big and environmentally destructive automobiles—the rapper as the object of indirect desire. (Few rappers are the direct objects of desire—Lil' Kim comes instantly to mind.) In the underground, it's more about identifying with the listener. The rapper presents his/her reality as having commonalities with others in the world of ordinary happenings. Few of us in the world often find ourselves surrounded by a bevy of horny and ass-heavy women or with the funds to keep a massive car fueled. But we do find ourselves dealing with what The Good Sin deals with: trying hard to be faithful to the one you love.

"Usually, I try to find whatever is going on in my life," The Good Sin explains to me over the phone. "I then hear the music, the beat, and then just work out the rest from there. For this project, I was initially inspired by 'Winterlude' [the fourth track on the album]. It contains the map for the entire project." And this brings me to my concluding comment: Still to this day, a late day in the 30-year history of hiphop, the best work to be found out there usually results from a collaboration between two people. This type of unit (what C. L. Smooth and Pete Rock once celebrated as "just two"), the rapper and the producer, the poet and the musician, has proved to be the most fertile ground for this type of art. - The Stranger

?I've long been a fan of Kellen Herndon, aka local MC The Good Sin, as a person and heavy-duty Twitter aficionado. But--no diss--his first project Ready or Not didn't grab me. Yesterday's drop, on the other hand, nine-track project Late, has already amassed the play counts to prove otherwise. Downloadable at only the cost of your e-mail address (for now, anyway), Late comes on the heels of single "Bad About You"--a song about crumbling relationships that sets a solid tone for the record, not as a breakup tape but simply on a "do you" tip. Achieve your own greatness.

Producer 10.4 Rog, initially introduced to the scene-at-large via collaborations with THEESatisfaction and Helladope, holds down all the project's airy, punctuated beats filled with keys and drum kicks. The Physics' producer Justo's tweeted sentiment deserves an echo: "@104rog is making some of the most Heated Heaters in the town right now."

And as Good Sin caps the project with "Endpiece," his heavy voice dives into full-on spoken-word poetry--an appropriate end to an introspective project:

"See we think we're running late/Live by others' expectations that we hate/But to ourselves it's a must/To set our own goals and in God We Trust/I never saw a wild thing sorry for itself/So why start now?" - Seattle Weekly