HUNGER FOR MORE (EX)

Personnel: Lloyd Banks (rap vocals); Eminem, 50 Cent, Nate Dogg, Snoop Dogg, The Game , Tony Yayo, Young Buck (rap vocals). Queens, New York-born Lloyd Banks couldn't have asked for a better stage on which to emerge. With 50 Cent's sudden ascension in 2003, his band of longtime mixtape stars, G-Unit, received a dose of national attention on the sturdy BEG FOR MERCY. The three-pronged attack of G-Unit is, as its name would imply, a collective effort, but on that record Banks repeatedly stole the show with his uncompromising, yet poetic rhymes and confident, wry delivery. Banks makes his hotly anticipated debut with THE HUNGER FOR MORE, an album whose title sums up the tough, yet introspective artist, a ravenous rapper who devours words hungrily. The world is spinning around nonstop in Banks's brain, and there is clearly not enough time for it all to get out. However, in the course of THE HUNGER FOR MORE, he tackles everything from the simple topics of love and sex and life on the streets to problems like bad karma and getting racially profiled at the airport. His paramount ability may be his talent for taking a timeworn topic and transforming it into something fresh, as on "I Get High" (fittingly featuring 50 Cent and Snoop Dogg) and "If You So Gangsta." Banks deftly balances the hardcore, the poetic, and the melodic, and THE HUNGER FOR MORE portends great things for the rapper.