Like a bling-bling-and-bullets album dedicated to God, many artists are currently as ideologically slippery as a Humvee climbing the banks of the Euphrates. VU are not those artists. These are times to feel passionately about politics, and VU is here to give voice to everything you’ve been feeling, but have been told by nightly polls that it’s impolite to say. Full of samples of demonstrators, visions of a humorously stark future, right-wing talking-heads and news broadcasts underscored by the mysterious Chief of Espionage on Rhodes organ, this is more than simple posturing. “I Was On A Journey To My Soul But The Police Just Pulled Me Over,” a spoken word piece by Paul S. Flores, sums up the feeling of simmering anger spilling out of our cities right now. Handbook is a powerful throwback to an era when rap and spoken word mattered-when voices refused to be silenced or censored.