It’s his undeniable passion for Hip Hop, however, along with his refusal to mine the L.P. gold fields that nullifies that argument. Mike doesn’t brandish his Linkin Park name or his picture on the album cover; he prefers to go by Fort Minor (although this could have easily been a safety measure in the event of an unprecedented debacle.)

What’s obvious on The Rising Tied is FM’s incidental indulgence in retro-rap flava on the hit single Petrified. With its hard-hitting boom-bap soundclash, Petrified is the sonic equivalent of a chin-check. Surprisingly, Mike is comfortably-seated on the opposite end of violent rap. In fact, he ridicules trite gangsterisms on Cigarettes (“Everyone exaggerates a tiny little bit, make that shit sound a lot more gangster than it really is”).

Occasional detours into “preachy” territory (in his attempt to diffuse rap stereotypes) do little to hurt the social commentary of Kenji and the motivational tone of Higher Road, where an urgent piano loop serves as a soundtrack to Mike’s therapeutic speech, with John Legend riding shot-gun. The LP’s moment of bliss is, however, the conceptual Right Now, where Black Thought leaves both Mike and his S.O.B. cronies in the dust, over Fort Minor’s hard-hitting sonic bed.

The Rising Tied doesn’t break any new grounds, but it’s loaded with enough breeziness to blow the lid off your perception of what real Hip Hop sounds like. Playing every instrument, writing every song, and producing every track himself, Fort Minor is nothing short of a class act.