The combination of the album title (I believe it stands for “All I Do is Sacrificed”) and Giovonni’s official website address (www.pleasenobacon.com, sadly) could produce a pretty negative first impression, which is why it’s such a delight to pop in the CD and discover that he actually has talent and knows what he’s doing. Born in the Bronx River neighborhood of New York, Giovonni has been committed to music for a long time, despite an interruption due to military service in South Korea. I don’t know what specifically brought him and his cohorts to the Atlanta/ Athens area, but A.I.D.S. is considerably more polished than the usual mixtape and is a welcome addition to the local scene. Giovonni’s voice is neither the occasionally too lazy drawl of Atlanta nor the angry, spittle-flecked straight shot of New York. The words are clear, the rhythms quick and the playing around impressively sure-footed. Production is light-handed but not thin, serving as a fine support to the vocals rather than detracting from them. In some ways, parts of the record sound like early Ghostface, full of Mayfieldian soul samples and deft layers of word-on-word to the point that one almost loses track of the narrative, but it’s more streamlined than its influences, keeping the number of songs to 12 and the length to 38 minutes. Perhaps weaker tracks were, in fact, sacrificed to the good of the whole, leading to a disc that cuts off at just the right point, without having annoyed the listener with an excess of politics or repeated its themes too often.

Hillary Brown