Apothecary Rx is the second studio album by Carl Hancock Rux

Carl Hancock Rux

‎Carl Hancock Rux is an award winning writer and performer; former Head of the MFA Writing for Performance Program at the California Institute of the Arts and has taught or been in residence at University of California–San Diego, Stanford University, University of Massachusetts Amherst,...

, produced by Rob Hyman

Rob Hyman

Robert Andrew "Rob" Hyman is an American singer, songwriter, keyboard player, accordion player, producer, arranger and recording studio owner, best known for being a founding member of the rock band The Hooters.-Early life:Hyman started taking piano lessons at the age of four and grew up playing...

 (of The Hooters

The Hooters

The Hooters is an American rock band from Philadelphia, Pennsylvania. By combining a mix of rock and roll, reggae, ska and folk music, The Hooters first gained major commercial success in the United States in the mid 1980s due to heavy radio and MTV airplay of several songs including "All You...

) and Stewart Lerman

Stewart Lerman

Stewart Lerman is a Bronx born, New York-based music producer, recording engineer, who has worked with The Roches, Antony and the Johnsons, Jules Shear, Marshall Crenshaw, Crash Test Dummies, Nellie McKay, Loudon Wainwright, Black 47, David Johanson, David Byrne, Willie Nile, Soulive, Darden Smith,...

. The album also features singer Stephanie McKay

Stephanie McKay

Stephanie McKay is a soul singer and songwriter from the Bronx in New York, whose music encompasses styles include elements of classic rock, funk, pop and hip hop....

 and contributions from jazz violinist Leroy Jenkins and singer-songwriter Marc Anthony Thompson (of Chocolate Genius).

Track listing

1. I Got a Name
   I Got a Name (song)
   "I Got a Name" is a 1973 single recorded by Jim Croce and written by Norman Gimbel and Charles Fox. It was released in 1973 and was the first single from his album of the same name. It reached a peak of 10 on the Billboard Hot 100 after spending 17 weeks on the chart. "I Got a Name" was also the...
   
    (5:00)
2. Me (4:29)
3. Ground (6:23)
4. Eleven more Days (4:49)
5. Disrupted Dreams (4:19)
6. Protean Character (4:36)
7. Shadow Interlude (0:51)
8. Fanon (5:32)
9. Lamentations (5:46)
10. Trouble of this World (4:50)
11. Apothecary Song (4:56)
12. Rx Suite: Movement 1 (5:51)

Personnel

• Carl Hancock Rux: vocals/producer
• Stewart Lerman: producer
• Rob Hyman: producer
• Stephanie McKay: featured vocalist
• Helga Davis: background vocals
• Marcelle Lashley: background vocals
• Irene Datcher: background vocals
• Vinicius Cantuária: acoustic guitar
• Marc Anthony Thompson: guitar
• Dave Tronzo: guitar
• Fred Cash: bass
• Steve Cohen: bass
• Leroy Jenkins: violin
• Ron Trent: percussion

Review

Six long years passed since Rux Revue, the debut album by poet and rapper Carl Hancock Rux, blew people's minds with its long aesthetic, beat-conscious, and literary reach. Six years is an eternity in the world of popular music. It's not only enough time to slip permanently off the mass-culture radar, it's an eternity that can deny you ever were on it to begin with. With Apothecary RX, Rux comes thundering back with one of the most expansive, ambitious, and musical recordings to come down the pipe in a long while. What ties these tracks together besides the musician's lyrical savvy (think scholarly, yet street lean and mean from the Gil Scott-Heron old school) and exceptional ear is almighty rhythm, as a cipher, as a shape-shifting ever-present in a musical meld that touches on everything from the Delta blues and Storyville to vanguard rock, vintage R&B, classic and futuristic pop, tough urban soul, and of course, the rainbow of sounds and beats that is hip-hop. A strange and unwieldy cast of characters were assembled for this set, including guitarist, avant jazz violin legend Leroy Jenkins, Marc Anthony Thompson (aka Chocolate Genius), Brazilian samba guitar genius Vinicius Cantuaria, Rob Hyman from the Hooters (who wrote "Time After Time" for Cyndi Lauper), and backing vocalists such as Irene Datcher, Stephanie McKay, and Helga Davis. Co-produced with help from Stewart Lerman (Black 47, Dar Williams), Rux assembles a montage of sounds that weave through and around one another in a constant effluvium of urban music that continually references and overwrites its history politically, socially, and spiritually. On the opener, "I Got a Name," with its shimmering African juju guitars that open onto a body of dubbed-out, compressed pianos, multi-layered percussion, and throbbing basslines, Rux sings, raps, and chants his way through to establish an identity in the African diaspora as it stands tall as its own signifier, the American urban landscape. On "Eleven More Days," the contrast of generations, religions, races, and social statures is played out on subway platforms, playgrounds, slam apartments, prisons, and in the streets. While Rux iterates the terrain and circumstances in his landscape, a stunning gospel refrain sung by a chorus of female voices emphasizes the place of intersection, the place of hope, the place of loss, and even deliverance while contrasting contrapuntal synthetic rhythms slip around basslines and indeterminate sounds. And while these two selections provide a view, they are by no means the only ones. Everywhere polyrhythmic strategies, multivalent pop textures, and smoky roots musics fold into one another, sometimes clashing but more often just touching and caressing one another before they move on to get Rux's poetic depth of field across, and that field never cancels anything out of its articulation, except perhaps hopelessness. Apothecary RX is indeed a prescription: musically it opens wide the current closed scene of alliteration, endless insider referencing, and production conceits by sounding organic and visceral without ever bogging down in its own ambition. Lyrically, it offers voices, many of them, sometimes speaking simultaneously, sometimes out of the depths of solitude, and they speak from reportorial detachment as well as from pain and joy and the desire to transcend as well as be delivered. Rux has created something off the boards here, unclassifiable, truly beautiful and moving. It is as unrelenting in its excellence as it is in its ambition. ~ Thom Jurek, All Music Guide.