Saul Williams is a recording artist more easily admired and respected than heard. His lyrics deliver a brutal punch, but despite his dynamic vocal delivery his abrasive instrumentation often tarnishes the experience. His poetry is fierce and the music does match it with equal ferocity – but the double attack is a challenging, grating listen over the course of a full record.

Merging spoken word and rap rock – two much abused, often just plain abusive genres – is a questionable move. The album leaches plenty of anger, and while Williams is far more eloquent than the others touting the rap/rock hybrid, it’s not exactly a genre known for wit, lyrical verve or politics. In fact, anything other than ‘she hates me, so I hate her’ qualifies as trailblazing inventiveness in the rap-rock world. Thankfully the genre died from self-inflicted head wounds and screams no more. Its fans split; finding their fix of rap aggression in the gangsta posturing of Eminem and 50 Cent, ‘everybody hates me’ lyricism behind the emo fringe and real breathing females in commercial house nightclubs.

So suppose an intelligent voice had actually latched onto the rap-rock sound what would that sound like? Someone who sounded like he’d read more than just the title of Chomsky’s latest and seen a clip of the new Michael Moore doco on a tour bus and declared his stuff to be ‘dope’. Rage Against the Machine and System of a Down may have both turned the mosh-pit towards their pulpit preaching, but most sweaty dudes heard little more than the heavy riffage. (It’s amazing how quickly a mocking System of a Down lyric like ‘with their fully automatics, they like to push the weak around’ distorts in a raging mosh-pit to a chant of ‘push the weak around’.)

Saul is a charismatic presence and has an impressive ability to shape a lyric into a piercing barb. He’ll smack you in the head with weights of history and politics, and leave you grinning for more. Without his humour this album would feel like a violent, bitter tirade from an outsider raised on stray pages of the Black Panthers handbook. But Saul manages to blend a twisted sense of humour with a Black Power stance that makes Chuck D seem like Michael Jackson. The highlight of the album, the piano driven and most ‘radio friendly track’, ‘Black Stacy’, is a perfect example of this mix/clash of dark humour and politics. The wry smirks of a lyric like…

I dreamt of being white,
And complimented by you.
But the only shiny black thing,
That you liked was my shoes.

... is undercut, as the music drops out, by the baldly confronting statement…

I always told you not to brag,
About the fact that your great grand-mother,
Was raped by her slave master.

On first listen this swerve in the lyric stuns, but like anything used for shock value its power diminishes on each listen and soon loses its power to stun.

‘List of Demands (Reparations)’ is an exception to this rule, as it attacks with an energy that simply could not be eroded by replay. Saul springs forth like a preacher at a burning pulpit, chanting his demands to a beat as incessant and menacing as the sound of helicopter gunfire laying waste to your house. The following track ‘African Student Movement’ sounds like Clipse’s ‘Grindin’’ with hard-minimalist beats hurling rocks at barricades, while the Neptunes had the Clipse rocking high-school bleachers.

Saul Williams is an artist that can not be ignored, but it’s hard to imagine listening to his record regularly. He avoids the coffee house clichés of the spoken word artist or poet, but in embracing musical extremes his words risk being lost and his audiences scared off. Members of both Rage Against the Machine and System of a Down guest on this album and his forthcoming release is produced by Nine Inch Nail Trent Reznor, so it doesn’t appear that he’s about to change musical direction. But even if you struggle to listen to his music, listen to his words. Or at least read them – after all, he is a poet.