| Compared to some of the shoddy revamping of vintage sounds committed to hard drive, neo-trip-hopper and multi-instrumentalist Daedelus is a master mortician. On Exquiste Corpse, Daedelus grabs old keyboards, drum machines, wind instruments and whatever else, sequences them to sound like samples pulled from the middle of the 20th Century, and drops in a host of collaborators like a Handsome Boy funeral home. In return for a sample lent to Madvillainy, Daedelus gets the meaty "Impending Doom" which has MF Doom dashing off lines like "This beat is sickly retarded, yo / Sound like it came off the Hate Ricky Ricardo show." The best of the rest are blips and bleeps courtesy of Prefuse 73 on "Welcome Home," Sci's toney lines laid over kung fu samples on "Move On," and "Cadavre Exquis" which cuts a spastic rug with French hip-hop collective TTC. Even when it's just Daedelus pulling the switches on the noir-inspired keys and strings ballad "Dearly Departed" it's as expansive as an entire session orchestra sitting in and then cutting their music into static. Just as Madlib extracted from the Blue Note catalog and emerged with something not quite hip-hop or jazz, Daedelus scours sounds from dead eras in his mind, dressing them up and disguising the whole affair as something undeniably alive. - CMJ |
1XLP/Out Of Print