Like rules, genres are meant to be broken. Mercurial producer/ rapper Kanye West took a left turn with his recent 808s & Heartbreak, deciding pain and misery are best served via auto-tune. Or even the current reports of platinum pushing hip-hop artist Lil Wayne releasing a rock album this year, tentatively titled Rebirth, mirrors a sign of the rapidly-changing times. Music, more than ever, has become a sonic melting pot’a jambalaya of likely, and often unlikely, sounds. Rock-rapper P.O.S. follows in a similar vein’merging punk, hip-hop, heavy metal, and electronica on his third, and arguably best, album, Never Better. The album straddles between rock and rap, while simultaneously creating a sense of urgency from P.O.S.’s introspective narrative. He’s sharp and quick-witted, blink to quickly and you’ll overlook gems like ‘Goodbye’, ‘Low Light Low Life’ and ‘Optimist (We Are Not for Them).’ The melancholy ‘Never Better’ is also dazzling for its futuristic mash-up of sounds. Few artists succeed where P.O.S. does: He’s proof that hip-hop and rock make for pleasant bedfellows.

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