We'll always have your absence

Ugh.

Alright, so Dälek's shiny new album Abandoned Language has been out for just over a month now. I'd like to, if I may, quote some lyrics from this - erm - difficult piece of music in comparison to its predecessor, the masterpiece of industrial meta-hip-hop that was Absence:

Broke stride as last of men realized their deep deceit.
This troubling advance of half-assed crews crowd these streets.
Never mind of who I am, son, just listen when I speak.
Broken paragraphs hold wrath of a hundred million deep.

Brilliant. Humble. Fierce. And now this:

Ranks of MC's infested with fakeness
Dispel your bitch rumors, tune the block with hangers
Wires givin' tumors, never write my songs for consumers
Ironic, cuz' I write my songs for heads with phat laces
on their Pumas.

Yeah. Ugh.

With little exception, my favourite hip hop duo of all freaking time aren't actually doing anything different with this 11 song turd. The elements that made Absence, From Filthy Tongues of Gods and Griots, and even the mildly amateurish Negro Necro Nekros great are all present. There's heavy beats, there's socially-oriented angry man lyrics, there's industrial noisescapes. Really, that's all Dälek ever was. But Abandoned Language? It sucks. It's a nigh unlistenable yawn of an album completely devoid of any passion or depth, and I hate that I have to admit this.

Forget emcee Dälek's daftly inane lyrics this time around, they could be salvaged if his delivery lent them any meaning at all. From the overdrawn titular first track to the hilariously thin complete-with-parentheses closer, (Subversive Script), the man called Dälek just sounds tired. I could get past his needless invocation of mainstream rap protocol - from constant masturbatory self identification to dropping the N-bomb all over the goddamn place - but his limp tone and empty styling of this garbage is unforgivable. His rhythm sucks. His flow carries no impact whatsoever. He doesn't so much rap as he mutters and coughs just barely enough to keep his head above the instrumentation, so underwhelming in the wake of his fierce success on previous albums that I can't reconcile this performance with him being the same man. I don't care who you are or what your profession is, I've heard more impressive speech about social perversity from my mother on any number of occasions.

Now, here's the kicker. I've explained before how Dälek's emceeing constitute less than half of what made Dälek the group great. I was apparently mistaken in initially assigning so much praise to Dälek's partner the Oktopus, since the former actually handles the production and sampling aspects of this music where the latter seems to be chiefly in it for the beats.  But nonetheless.

The music that is inflicted on you when you listen to Abandoned Language is less than paper thin. It's flat, lacks any depth or layering, and is boring.

There, I said it.

For some reason these men decided that metallic bagpipes, played off-kilter and off-key, were the future of industrial music and rubbed this godawful effect all over a half a dozen songs with no thought to its effectiveness as a sound nor its synergy with the overall album. Where before we fans were treated with incredibly multi-faceted swaths of gorgeously envisioned, viciously executed seas of noise - both intense and, y'know - featuring rhythm and melody - we now have the five and a half minute all instrumental "scary" track Lynch dropped right in the middle of a fucking hip hop album. Not only does it make no sense for this group to be aping Krzysztok fucking Penderecki of all goddamn people when they used to go on tour with goddamn Isis - this track absolutely ruins what is already a wan, barely interesting album.

Forgive the segue, but I've heard a lot of praise for this piece of music. Those people can go to hell as soon as they get off their avant-garde fellating high horse. The title track off of Absence is ten times as affecting as Lynch, clocks in at four minutes shorter than it, and actually strengthens the album as a whole without running away with its own sense of assinine artistic license. No album is stronger for being interrupted by a piece of music that jarringly reports of its makers saying, "Hey, I've got an idea: let's torture some violins with a belt sander, record it to MIDI, and call it art."

Back to the point: Abandoned Language's production and instrumentation are the very definition of anemic. Now, I realize I'm blugeoning Dälek under the sheer weight of my favouritism here, but Absence had such dense layering and virtually endless chasms of fascinating, genuinely powerful sound that I am still discovering new facets within it. The duo managed to put together the single most gargantuan drum mix in the entire world, conjured massive blows of utterly indescribable music out of the gutters of Hades, and lashed it all together with pure dripping acid out of Dälek's mouth. It was impossible, and they managed it with grace and power. Hell, From Filthy Tongues didn't even reach to such great heights, but pulled off a direct assault of simpler industrial prowess and tighter dynamics without needing to.

Now? Now look at what they're producing: every track has the same goddamn tinny one-two drum beat; by-the-numbers industrial vapours flit listlessly from one end of the song to another without accomplishing anything; the mix is not so much dark as it is maddeningly foggy, to the point where one can hardly understand a word of what Dälek is saying (penultimate track Tarnished, for example, features half of his rhymes delivered whilst his face is behind what I assume is a thick leather baseball glove); uselessly out of place gang vocals repeatedly confuse the proceedings and there is no intensity offered by either camp of this duo and finally my god it just plain sucks.

Fuck.

I waited up for you, you guys. This was just cruel, you understand?

Excuse me while I go carve a gigantic all-caps WTF into my right arm.  Good night.