A moth gives freely of itself unto the bulb

Today marks the first time in three years that my last.fm (audioscrobbler, if you're nasty) has beeped, whirred, clicked, and spat out a Weekly Top Artists list completely dominated by hip hop acts. It wasn't so much as a year ago that I'd casually whip out that most frequent of colloquial wankisms that so dominate the self-styled Indie culture, "I like everything; except hip hop, rap and country. You know, good music." Depending on the flair with which you popped out that "good", your audience would know just how hip you are.

Lame.

To be fair, it's really not hard to understand this cadre of skittish youngsters' cynicism toward all things hip hoppy: take a peek at what's busting platinum in the genre and ask yourself if you'd give it even half of one chance to please your ear. The seemingly endless army of store-bought gang-stahs parading around the virtues of mysogyny, crass materialism and dropping things like they are various uncomfortable temperatures aren't exactly stopping their indulgences in favour of anything artistic or progressive. It isn't a stretch to call these false paragons of hip hop things like "rephrensible" and "multiple felons", and brand the rest of the genre likewise and believe me, I was right in there doing so.

Too bad for me. I'm not eager to jump on the bandwagons I'm seeing crop up here and there proclaiming "hip hop is the new indie", because I feel like a tool making any proclamation of the sort and could tell you a few stories you'd like me less for. But with full view of the huge influx of cookie-cutter acts since Modest Mouse smashed their way into the public eye 'round ought-four, I must admit a steady standardization of indie rock and pop.

And you all know what the OC has done to us. Yeah, it keeps me up at night too.

Hip hop, on the other hand, has laboured fantastically under the heavy burden and resulting oversight its overpaid pop culture liasons have reaped. Startlingly unique acts have blessed my ears with seemingly endless poise and experimentation for months. Every conceivable genre has been hijacked into poignant, musically powerful hybrids by any number of artists for years, from metal in Dalek to electronica in Prefuse 73 to glitchy singer-songwritery indie pop in Why?.

You can trust me on this, you'd like the stuff if you gave it that one half chance. Let me point you in the right direction:

Top five hip hop albums to convert indie kids with

5. Why? - Elephant Eyelash


Just talking about this week, this is just this-week-Josh talking here, Why? statistically blew away all comers in the ever-heated battle for my listening time. The solo project of Yoni Wolf, an Anticonian beatmaster making up one third of personal favourite cLOUDDEAD, Elephant Eyelash conjures all manners of psychadelic and pop influences and channels it throught the unbelievably tight confines of Yoni's synthesized beats. Finding his closest mirror in indie-pop favourite Emperor X, absolutely every note on this ecclectic masterstroke finds itself synthesized and tossed together with any number of unlikely mates: acoustic guitars weave in and out of turntable quips, gorgeously selected samples gallop wide-eyed past exulting strings, and Yoni's own half-sung rhymes tell beautiful pop tales that'd make the The Piper at the Gates of Dawn look sober.

4. J Dilla - Donuts


Instrumental, sample-driven, defiantly theatric and sadly posthumous, Jay Dee's late and great celebration of glistening organic production packs the emotive and intellectual impact of any art-film you'd care to name. Drawing his samples from generations of soul and blues and working them over with the skill of a true craftsman, Donuts is a boundless canvas of glittering tableaus, the sleek deliverance of literally dozens of succinct, beautiful feelings so ineffably personal, so obviously real that they shrug off any need for identification. A producer's producer album, Donuts is as sweaty and visceral as hip hop gets, and twice as classy. I can turn this on any day and get lost in it.

3. Dalek - Absence


I've spoken on these two men more than any other artist thus far, and I'll do it again. Signed to Ipecac Recordings, who carry such monster acts as Isis, Hella, and the goddamn Melvins, Dalek are the metalhead's hip hop act. Their latest LP notwithstanding, Dalek bring the noise: whole canyons of it, stretching and gouging sampled instruments, vividly industrial synthesizers, and some of the best scratching in the field, care of turntablist DJ Still. These men literally produce the heaviest drum mix I've ever encountered, bar none, and throw down intelligence and social conciousness with sincerity and vigor. What's best, while the wall of sound that Absence hits you with certainly overwhelms, surrendering to the storm of it yields breathtakingly detailed music, unstoppable layers of sound harnessed into powerful songs as affecting and potent as any of their rock brethren.

2. Prefuse 73 & The Books - Prefuse 73 Reads The Books


This is completely shameless indie baiting, what with the Books' status as indie/electronica darlings, but herein lies the heart and soul of this ridiculous list. Instrumental and sample driven like Donuts, Prefuse 73 Reads The Books opts out of the organic and slaloms gracefully into the electronic, the spiritual and the futuristic. Seamlessly merging the Books glitchy acoustic guitar noodling with Prefuse 73's flawless production and beats, the album soars close to Post Rock, Boards of Canada level ambition but settles comfortably for a celebration of beautiful sounds.

1. Subtle - For Hero: For Fool


Most of the men and women, including my own family, have found me quite honestly frothing at the mouth in praise of Subtle's utter perfection of form and content, and yet I've hardly put any space aside for the angelic For Hero: For Fool herein. I could and probably soon will devote pages upon pages to each and every track, something which so consumed my idols at CMG that they could barely contain their review of even one track in the confines of the mere internet.

Trying to describe the genre-bending Subtle accomplish through this, their second proper album is pointless: the sextet leave such petty considerations far, far behind. The amalgamation of electric cello, Jeffrey Logan's impeccably sharp beats, all manners of woodwind and synthetic flourishes, and Doseone's jaw-dropping impressionist liturgy come together with such grace and gut-level power that I've repeatedly failed to do the men justice - hence the frothing. No single album has ever proffered such crossover appeal, so gorgeously combined mind razing dance aesthetics with such heavenly orchestral dynamics, with such progressive lyricism as could startle any modern poetic scene and render all lesser emcees obsolete. I've made the journey through FH:FF's weightless body numberless times by now, and every trip never fails to leave me overwhelmed.

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.

Don't go there, just don't

Mother fucker.

Dälek is releasing a new album, Abandoned Language, and it comes out tomorrow.

Dälek!
New album!

And I didn't know about this until just now holy tap-dancing Moses.  This is like Christmas and my birthday rolled into one.  Yes, a gargantuan, chain-encrusted, fire-breathing Christmas.

Ehm.

So, you'd think that a combination of math metal, Jams's omnipresent white noise, a website consisting of nothing but thousands of pictures of food, and shouting at your computer to locate a copy, any copy, of the album you totally didn't fucking know existed would result in a soothing night's sleep.  Wouldn't you?

Alas, some things just don't add up.

I just found a torrent for Abandoned Language. I hyperventilated as my trembling hand carefully manipulated the correct sequence of options that would hopefully, god-willing, deliver this unproven jewel to my ears. I blessed the wanton network of piracy that is the internet and may have developed tumescence.

I wonder if I'm the only person in the world who's losing sleep over industrial noise rap.

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'.