| I've made enough ill-advised purchases to recognize that it's common practice for artists to release instrumental hip-hop albums, stripping away the vocals and selling rappers' souls to throngs of incompetent DJs. That's why the new Daedelus album is a little perplexing: It's a "rethinking" of this year's The Weather, an album that found Busdriver and Radioinactive unleashing arrhythmic non-sequiturs and product placement over Daedelus' harp-filling, beat-killing wingtip hip-hop. The beats on The Weather were actually pretty inspired, especially given that Daedelus was an IDM artist sampling ultra-vintage 78s for the Plug Research label long before he ever attempted a project like this one. In retrospect, though, The Weather seems a cage, wherein a dejected Daedelus was enslaved in order to prevent overshadowing the vocalists. Rethinking the Weather is when a loophole in the hip-hop bureaucracy accidentally let loose a lunatic whose only munitions are his attention deficit disorder and a vast reservoir of every type of pop music since 1920. Suffice to say, the "rethinks" are basically little more than extravagant versions of the old ones. The music consists of little kids' playground games, 60's saccharine pop, and those harp-and-strings passages that always mean Jimmy Stewart's about to have yet another bad dream. "Chorus, Verse, Chorus" is a full Japanese torch song protected by the sort of blaxploitation sword-funk that Rza would be proud of. "Dark Days" is a 60's girl band interspersed with the kind of silly jams those kids from Peanuts would always stumble around to. These kinds of songs are simultaneously bizarre, obscene, and pretty damn stupid, together forming my definition of "mildly amusing." But sometimes the formula lunges into "masterpiece" status: the classic "Greatly Exaggerated, Our Demise" layers reggae, James Brown-style yelps, children's jump-rope rhymes, and 50's easy listening, ending up somewhere between a Jamaican prison's carousel and the appliance section at Sears. While even this kind of music is a little grittier than Daedelus' 2002 solo release Invention, if not as complex, elsewhere Daedelus vigorously fights the power like a homeless Def Jux producer. Hip-hop doesn't get much more abrasive than "Missing," which is about as dirty as shuffling across a freeway wearing nothing but soup cans. There isn't really much of a comparison between this and The Weather; one is intended as a sort of supplement to the rappers (maybe a complement in the perfect rapocracy), while the other has nothing to rely on but itself. At the same time, there's enough overlap that you should probably pick one or the other. Basically it comes down to which you like more: lyrics or rule-breaking polyphony. - Pitchfork |
1XLP/Out Of Print