Mac Lethal gives good hugs. He also punches really hard.

After putting in a decade of hip-hop elbow grease; he one day realized he has put entirely too much time into honing his craft. The problem was, however, that he hasn't put nearly enough time into saving his money, laying off the booze, overcoming his weakness for seductive women, and finally creating his groundbreaking album that explains this strange enigma of a man.

Featured in Urb Magazine's Next 100 in 2003, next to 99 other artists that still work day jobs, Mac Lethal really had made some deep impressions on the music industry. He was the media's little pitbull puppy -- terrorizing rappers at prestigious events like Scribble Jam and taking the championship belt, or gorilla-style touring with hip-hop flagship artists Atmosphere and Sage Francis.

When asked about such remarkable accomplishments, Mac Lethal said, "Being addicted to sleeping pills is like being addicted to Kool-Aid. All it does is add flavor to nature's fine creation." Um. He may have said something slightly more pertinent to his music career, however, he was eating a delectable slab of Kansas City BBQ and was hard to understand.

That has been his theme; Being hard to understand.

Rewind 24 years. Get out of your time machine, and walk to Kansas City, MO, where you will find a young McCleary Sheldon in the warm arms of his lovely mother. Spending his whole life under her free-spirited, very musically interactive supervision, Mac developed a deeply compassionate and playfully wild sense of creativity. Falling whole-heartedly in love with hip-hop music at a young age, he spent years polishing his own brand of the artform, until it finally earned him attention and notoriety.

Being able to take a painfully beautiful situation and extract lighthearted laughter out of it, or being able to take a lighthearted situation and highlight the painful beauty of it; McCleary Sheldon is nothing different from Mac Lethal's hilarious, emotionally in-tune musical character. Infact, Mac Lethal is never out of character.

On 11:11, Mac Lethal's Rhymesayers debut album, Mac takes the listener on a sonically catchy, sarcastic, and tortured ride through the self-destructive maze Mac was trapped in. Finding harmony within pop-culture, love, sleep, food, drugs, and alcohol, you are befriended by a generous, playful man who you instantly fall in love with. However, this playfulness is to be interpreted as a mask for something much deeper. Mac is ultimately confronting the most difficult things any human being can encounter: heartbreak, disappointment, and finally; death.

This is the part where we work in the fact that it's only a matter of time before Mac Lethal's brilliant music will shoot him into large, mainstream success..

band link: http://www.myspace.com/maclethal