** Arsonists

AS THE WORLD BURNS

(Matador)

Judiciously resequenced on a weekend college-radio hip-hop show I picked up driving from Rhode Island to Boston, the Arsonists' As the World Burns became dizzy and downright dope. Two lunchroom lyricists taking their mystery-meat heartburn out on each other (while pounding out a beat by hand on plastic trays) gave way to a weird waltz-time throwdown with an intro that played Wu-Tang Clan Orientalism as Jim Carrey slapstick.

But without a DJ providing the editorial slant, this New York crew mostly blow smoke. Their full-length debut brims with enough redundant raps about cutthroats and fakers to fill a week of soap-opera sick days when the Soap Opera Digest version would have sufficed. The equally dispensable "Underground Vandal" squanders the disc's best beat on a track that name-drops every indie rapper in New York in the guest-list tradition of Black Star's "B Boys Will B Boys," Genius's "Labels," and Mary Lou Lord's "His Indie World." The disc has its boy-wonderish moments, as when "Session" sends shifty jazz bass down a dark hallway and discovers a taekwon-flowing MC behind every door. And any time rhyme animal D-Stroy gets near a mike, chest-beating realness yields to pure nutcracking monkey-house lunacy. Wish the crew's cannons got loose like that more often.

-- Alex Pappademas