The Green Ghost Project

Album Review

DJ Green Lantern has carved out a comfortable niche in the New York hip-hop scene with his frequent mixtapes and successful collaboration projects with a variety of MCs. In the same way, Styles P is a New York rapper who has managed to stay visible with a steady stream of mixtapes in addition to his official solo LPs and his work as one-third of D-Block. With that in mind, Green Ghost Project seems like a natural outing for each artist. Largely produced by Green Lantern (an all-star supporting cast of producers including Buckwild, Statik Selektah, Scram Jones, and the Alchemist also contribute a beat apiece) with Styles P doing the honors on the mike, Green Ghost Project lives up to expectations without doing much to exceed them. There's the usual studio gangsta stoicism (see Styles' musings on incarceration on "Send a Kite"), lush-life boasts ("Make Millions from Entertainment," "Legal Money," and the high-adrenaline banger "Pablo Doe"), and a bevy of guest spots from like0minded East Coast vets (Noreaga, Raekwon, and Styles' Y-O homies Jadakiss and Sheek Louch). The rowdy M.O.P. collaboration "Bang Time," with its cacophonous chorus and gun-obsessed verses, stands as one of the record's highlights, but also offers nothing we haven't before. All in all, Green Ghost Project is a quality excursion in East Coast street-hop with many of New York's finest playing their parts well.