Early bedroom recordings are usually an area to tread lightly. With rare exception do we ever get anything better than a poor quality recording of a talent that hasn’t yet developed. However, with the untimely passing of Micheal “Eyedea” Larsen, I can understand the desire to dig through his unreleased material. Grand’s Sixth Sense was made with Abilities when they were young teens, around fourteen to sixteen years old, recorded on a four track. This recording would lay the foundation for First Born, their first proper album together just a few years later.

One listen to this album, and you’ll realize that Eyedea and Abilities had a head start on most artists their age. The skill of Eyedea as an emcee is already at a very high level, with complex rhyme schemes and long form narrative already being employed. It was about this time when I was trying to think of how advanced he was for his age that I remembered how young he was when he won Scribble Jam in 1999 (seventeen, for those playing at home). The beats and scratching are solid and inventive as well, which is good time to note that Abilities was also winning DMC regional championships the same time Eyedea was competing at Scribble Jam. So what do we get from Grand’s Sixth Sense? It’s a strange listen, as it’s bad and good all at once. We have two extremely talented young teenagers who have yet to fully develop their skills, but they still sound better than most amateurs who start recording at an older age. The sound quality is a little fuzzy and the levels are off, but that’s to be expected. Eyedea’s lyrics come across as a smart kid who hasn’t yet realized the power of his words, namely how the intent behind the lyrics can be different than how listeners interpret them. I’m sure he just thought he was being clever at the end of “Disconnected,” when he pretends to be an auctioneer selling off a weak emcee, and didn’t mean anything beyond that, but the racial politics that come into play with Eyedea’s whiteness and the history of auctioning slaves in America is too troublesome to be ignored. There are also some hackneyed dick jokes, again a marker of an immature kid. The best news is that listening to their first proper album, First Born, which came out about four years later in 2001, seeing the amount of growth that Eyedea and Abilities went through is amazing. Having that context makes all the lumps in Grand’s Sixth Sense a little easier to swallow.

It’s an odd recording, with enjoyment coming from a unique combination of fascination with a historical document and an album that while flawed, is still some pretty good hip hop. If this was a brand new record, I’d tell the kids to stick with it, be careful with their word choices, develop your song structure further, and work with someone who could teach you about recording techniques. As it is, I don’t need to worry about these things, as their artistic growth is evident across the course of the three albums Eyedea and Abilities made together after Grand’s Sixth Sense. Enjoy this release for what it is, and then spend some time with the rest of their catalog, and enjoy the body of work we got out of Micheal Larsen while he was with us.