Two years after their debut CD, musically, Grito Serpentino is a more polished, more skilled and more experienced group. This is well reflected in the new album which shows a more confident and artistically developed group of artists whose musical arrangements reflect a depth and complexity not present in their first album.

Still pulling from an extremely diverse range of musical influences as in the first album, Para La Gente goes a step further presenting a broader and more complete mastery of stylistic range. This is exemplified in the traditional Cuban son and montuno chord structure and rhythms of tracks like Mexico1998, Papi Was A Pitcher and Searching for Cesar, the delta blues riffs and slow, sexy basslines of Hellakeed and Unidad, and funk and R&B influenced tracks like I Be The Poet and The Truth.

Other tunes feature more experimental combinations such as Brujeria which starts with a traditional montuno sound then transitions into a Santana style rock ballad and ends in a frenzied Latin ska complete with horn section.

Two of the eleven tracks featured on the album, Hellakeed and Unidad, were recorded live at the 1999 Pochopalooza festival in San Jose and manage to capture that distinctive raw quality and sense of atmosphere associated with live recordings.

Poems like 2 Beer Pepe and Searching for Cesar look deep into the social and environmental issues that create who we are. However, the newest poem, Papi Was a Pitcher, written especially for the new album, is a seven minute biography and homage to Pinate's father that reveals a vulnerability and sensitivity not seen in the first album.

The sensual, Hellakeed and the bombastic I Be the Poet with their onslaught of internal and near rhyme and hip hop influenced cadences reveal the influence of the east coast slam poets that Pinate encountered when he competed at the National Slam Championships in Chicago in 1999 (Pinate's San Jose Slam team won the national title that year). Old habits die hard, however, and for those looking for a dose of in your face, brown pride the tracks Unidad and The Truth provide listeners with a blunt, sometimes graphic account of police brutality and the (in)justice system in this country.

This is some of the old Marc Pinate at his raw and unrepentant best, whose blatant distain for the police and hegemonic institutions of power are matched by the precision and tightness of his literary assaults. Two beautiful poems in Spanish, a love poem that appears in Brujeria and a piece about Pinate's search for his Mexican roots in Mexico 1998 add another layer to his arsenal of poetic talents.