Yelling at movie characters is neither pleasant nor productive

Exams are leering over the horizon. It's offensive, really. Just as bad is the Lake Ontario climate, which decided to mark the beginning of the brief vacation afforded to me between papers and mid-years by dumping snow all over my goddamn campus.

I manage to keep busy in spite of this.

New one for you today, O gentle and largely imaginary reader. I'm still picking through the massive endeavour which is Califone's Roots and Crowns for proper service within the blogosphere, but the new dusting of snow's pushed pushed up shimmering memories an album I fell in love with in winter.



Dälek are hip hop to me. That's die-ah-lek, for some reason; I'm no linguistics major and am not down, per se, with the umlauts. Prior to being exposed to the tidal wave of sound these two men produce, I was in the comfortable position of spouting epithets like, "I love all kinds of music. Except for rap and shit like that." The genre gets a - just wait for it - bad rap (BAM. Yes I did) at the hands of far too many self-described aficionados. People like their music just so, and it's a knee jerk response to heap scorn on any song sporting a rapping emcee. I was like that, but I was fortunate enough to download the duo's third album, Absence, and have my face, arms, and legs melted off.

I mean that in the best possible sense.

Dälek sport a rapping lyricist, he goes by Dälek (but doesn't constitute Dälek the band) and he is phenomenal. His delivery is absurdly sharp and filled with more genuine passion and, what I really love, anger (!!!) than most any punk or metal vocalist out there. I don't have the stones, much less the experience to try to place him in any sort of context within the greater hip hop genre, but his performance is unbelievably sharp and consistently, jaw-droppingly impressive. I've never, ever heard anyone on record with such flawless rythm and gymnasticly powerful cadence. Dre-era Benjamin Andre might surpass on some points, but his rubber band excellence has been a little overshadowed by his senseless prediliction for mediocre singing of late.

What's even better, and genuinely inspiring, Dälek's subject matter is deliciously dark and astonishingly, viscerally strong. His gruff, meaty delivery of political diatribes is never, ever boring, and thought provoking in a way very very few musicians can really accomplish. He weaves near-future film noir soundscapes, glittering with revolutions and uprisings of passion. Listen to his verses on tracks like Culture For Dollars or Distorted Prose, give him a real shot, and tell me it isn't extremely affecting. His repeated invocation of griot heroes is telling. Griots are traditional African story tellers, troubadours of ancient black tribes respected for their preservation and eternal defence of a culture.

I learned that from Absence and yes I did have to look it up.

Now, here's the rub. Skilled as Mister Dälek is, his presence on Absence is much less than half the story. Much much less. Let's discuss the Oktopus.

I can probably identify one or two of the sounds that show up in a given Dälek track. The rest are sheer goddamn mysteries, and it is absolutely fantastic in that right. The man known as the Oktopus handles the instrumental and production and of Dälek's existence (apparently a fellow named Still contributed on the turntable end, but not as a principle component of the troupe), backing his emcee with unfathomably gigantic beats and mountains of noise that sound like My Bloody Valentine routed their guitars through a reverb effect in Hell. To dub the result as A) Stunning and B) A tad difficult would be more than understatement, it'd be injustice.

I think, as I remember it, the first time I sat through Absence I raved to Jams about it as being something like "If you stripped Gorrilaz of their humanity, tortured them for years and then set them up in a studio with the ability to sample field recordings from Hades, you'd have this record."

Of course, this was gross hyperbole and the Gorrilaz comparison didn't make any kind of sense, but it's a rough approximation of Absence's ability to fuck you up most gloriously.

The Oktopus is a genius. A verifiable candidate for Mensa, entirely on the basis of what he does here. From the skyscraping jaws of Distorted Prose, which bends and scrapes a sampled guitar lick to ridiculous heights, to the jarringly brilliant saw blade and heart-stoppingly technical (and properly beautiful) scratching of Culture for Dollars, the barely contained gargantuan assault of A Beast Caged and the cold clarity in the steam-driven symphony of Ever Sombre, this man is limitless. The music to be found in this album can hardly be catalogued in words, given over much more to severely intense and provocative ambience than simpler musicianship. The Oktopus destroys what anyone might conceive ambient music to be: he's DJ Shadow with rabies and a persecution complex, he's The Books with chainsaw arms. Hell, he's Sigur Ros possessed by the devil, and he does unthinkably creative, utterly unstoppable work.

And it sucks that they've got such little support in the world. They're too noisy for the hip hop crowd and too hip hop for the noise crowd. I don't know if it's my place to call any artist ahead of their time, but I'll be damned if these two never get the respect that's so keenly owed to them.

The Descent was a terrible movie.  I have never slept so well after taking in an alleged horror movie.  They could've called it Gollum: The Big Hungry Musical with Stupid Scottish Women in a Cave for some Reason.  

It may've gotten more attention that way, I'm just sayin'.