Back to Dust

Background

Sev Statik was active as a rapper in the Albany area since the early 1990s. After released two EPs in 1996, in 1997 he co-founded the supergroup Deepspace5 and joined the West Coast hip hop collective Tunnel Rats. In 2002, Sev Statik released his debut studio album, Speak Life. Two more studio recordings followed: Slow Burn in 2005 and Sliver LP in 2007.

DJ Dust was active as a DJ for the group Indianapolis group deadpoetsociety during the mid 1990s. In 1998, while at a conference, he met Manchild, a member of The Pride and a co-founder of Deepspace5. The two founded the project Mars Ill, and DJ Dust also joined the Deepspace5 collective. DJ Dust released a solo album, No Fame, in 2006.

Release

Back to Dust was first released on October 9, 2007, through Rawkus Records. The album was selected by the label as part of its Rawkus 50 campaign, a program in which fifty hip hop artists were selected from submissions to the label. Following the October 9 release date, the album was uploaded to iTunes on October 16. Sev Statik and DJ Dust also partnered with the rapper Braille's Hip Hop IS Music to released a digipak version of the album. This version came out the following year on July 7.

Style and lyrics

The album was described falling within alternative and underground forms of Christian hip hop. Christianity Today found the style similar to that of Mars Ill, Deepspace5, Tunnel Rats, and LPG. The production uses a diverse assortment of musical elements, including jazz-style piano, frenetic drum kits, soulful vocals, harpsichord licks, and spoken word and a cappella passages. DJ Dust also made extensive examples of mid- to late-1990s rock, jazz, and blues, as well as excerpts of preaching. While some tracks featured complex layers of soundscapes, others are very minimalistic and simple in their construction.

The title of the recording, Back to Dust, is a reference to Genesis 3:19, where God reminds Adam that he will return to dust upon his death. Working from this theme, Sev Statik approaches a diversity of interconnected topics, such as mass media brainwashing and family problems, but highlights life, death, and creation throughout.

Reception

Back to Dust was critically acclaimed upon its released. Christianity Today awarded the album four-and-a-half stars out of five, calling it "Alternative rap at its finest." The reviewer, Andree Farias, said that he was hard pressed to single out any favorites, as "Cut after cut, bar after bar, the tandem offers some of the most redemptive hip-hop the Christian scene has seen in recent memory." He did caveat that the appeal of the album might not be immediate, as it needs to be taken in and savored slowly.

Jerry Bolton of The Phantom Tollbooth gave the album a perfect score of five stars, exclaiming that "Back To Dust, quite simply, is so good that I couldn't believe my ears. It took a month of regular rotation to quiet my cynicism and fully agree with my initial feeling: this is the best collection of beats & rhymes this year."

Remixed version

On May 29, 2010, Sev Statik released a version of the album remixed by Theory Hazit. Originally, Sev Statik's fellow Tunnel Rats member Dert was scheduled to release the album.