Chris Palko a.k.a. Cage is the kind of person who shouldn't worry about rumors, mostly because it would be damn near impossible to even come close to competing with the truth.

Think about what you were doing when you were five... playing Nintendo 64? Collecting bugs? This dude was tying a tourniquet around his drug-addicted father's arm between beatings. How about during your late teens? Finishing up with puberty? Pre-gaming a high school dance? This dude was an unwilling and misdiagnosed test subject in a mental institution. For someone who was doing drugs before his peers had moved from tee-ball to Little League, and whose bitter hatred of authority figures goes without saying, a move to the rap world post-madhouse seemed like a logical first step toward recovery. Just take a listen to Palko's debut album with Def Jux and you'll hear just how perfectly logical of a step that was.

While his new EP I Never Knew You -- which he's giving away to promote the upcoming 7/7 album -- is certainly not lighthearted, it does contain promising evidence that Palko is willing to expand his artistic horizons beyond the confines of his fascinating, albeit horrifying past. The title track is a half-sung sex march through the shadows; "Hell Oh" is a paranoid castigation of "green pictures of white men"; the final track, "It's The '80s Again", features an unstoppable flow with that old-school frankness about the carefree consumption of the decade.

Panko is clearly someone with a lot on his mind, and this EP shows that he's just as capable at creating stories as he is at retelling them. After all, you can't rap about daddy forever.

Recommended Tracks:
I Never Knew You
It's The '80s Again