| Wow. That's the first and most accurate word that popped into my head when I dropped the beam on this disc. And this isn't an ecstatic, mind-blowing "wow," it's more of a confused, head spinning from too much stylistic divergence kind of "wow." In short, this album is not for the faint of heart. Hell, those of hearty chest muscles may even find some of this hard to swallow. For the most part the bulk of The Weather is experimental beyond the word. It's like a demented Saturday morning cartoon filtered through the mind of a feverishly ill Beetlejuice (the Michael Keaton realized Tim Burton entity, not the sex crazed wee man of Howard Stern fame, although God only knows what goes through his mind). The album begins with children shouting off the countdown before Radioinactive let's loose with a rambling stream of consciousness flow that talks about wet couches, Sasquatch, gazpacho, pasta, and potatoes au gratin. Busdriver then drops in for the second verse, sounding like he just escaped from the Freestyle Fellowship, both in timbre (a deep, resonating basso) and rapid-fire delivery. Then Radioinactive pongs back into the mix, adopting a Psylon computerized voice to deliver his next verse. The whole thing unravels like a rambling, erratically amusing spiel augmented by what can only be described as Sesame Street-on-acid-jazzadelics. For the next track, "Pen's Oil," the groove continues to mine the astral jazz plane, starting off with a Leave It to Beaver flute engorged bounce and crazy cartoon whirs and wheeze. Then Sesame Street-styled singers chime in, fade away, and allow Radioinactive to speed dial his tongue in a dizzying array of verbal non-conformity. Busdriver jumps in for a short neo-chorus that exclaims, "Just because the world runs on oil, doesn't mean oilmen should run the world / Just because the sky's my paved road, doesn't mean you should pave a road over the sky." The song is much more bouncy and sonically coherent than its predecessor and the theme is certainly apropos considering the nature of our current foreign affairs promotional tour in Baghdad. "Carl Weathers" continues to up the ante in terms of more accessible production as a shuffling rhythm melds with a darkly tinged quasi-dirge and echo-shift electronic boing. Bus and Radio latch onto the beat and deliver perhaps their most standard (and I use the word "standard" loosely when applied to their styles) joint on the album. The singsong chorus of "Partly cloudy with an increased chance of rain" is a wonderfully mesmerizing refrain that enhances the track's musical brilliance. An off-kilter classic. By the time I reached the middle of the album, my head was spinning a double 360 auto-reverse that would make Regan MacNeil envious. Tracks like "Weather Locklear" bounce along with I Dream of Genie whistling samba flutters that begin to collapse under the weight of what sounds like a single take and some tuckered puckers (tired lips, fools). "Break for 2300" is just that, a high school horn section augmented by click tracks. "Dj Furry" is like a drunken cartoon karaoke gone awry. And "Raffle Ticket Blues" is a darkly lit, piano fueled low-key rant. "Name Forgetter" returns to the children's show ambiance with bugged audio snippets. Busdriver then injects the track with a frenzied flow that rides the cherubic string arrangement with radical aplomb. This may be the second classic on the album (and for those keeping tabs, "Thousand Words" would be the third). In many instances the lyrics encoded on the CD work better taken out of the recorded context and left to be read silently to oneself off the page of the liner notes as if they were poems written in a chapbook. I often found lyrical passages that didn't seem to work within the context of a particular song ended up making more sense and becoming more impactful when I read along to Bus and Radio's varied deliveries. Radioinactive sums it up quite succinctly on "Name Forgetter" when he says: "I cater to the nerves of wordsmiths" In many ways this album is for those hip-hop cognoscenti who realize that the medium is much more than bling, that it's heavily rooted in the oft neglected realm of the spoken-word. So while I applaud this crew's chaos-enhanced bravado, I also find that much of the album floats above my level of attention, my basest rap instincts craving for just one boom-bap track, just a little more structure, a little more stripped down groove. But if you're looking for a challenging head-trip, then this is your blue plate special. - IGN |
2XLP/Out Of Print