| It starts with birds, a tiny nightmare loop of the April dawn chorus, a proclamation, a declaration, a line of poetry, a snippet of song. Then it starts for real. Bells, clangs, shakers, beats, and an onslaught of words. And behind the voices, more damn birds. Fuck. This is beautiful music. You have to excuse my ignorance. I'm a keen ornithologist but I don't know shit about this hip-hop stuff. I'm working on it. Yesterday my friend came by with birthday gifts: a squeaky plastic monkey's head and a box of home copied cds. I'd asked him for some quality hip-hop, new stuff, weird good stuff, stuff I wanna hear. He'd obliged, and slipped in a Van Dyke Parks album too, just in case it all got too much. But you know what, they're not a million miles apart, Van Dyke and Doseone - no really. Slippery American nightmare poets, sonic overloaders, albums that are supposed to be concept works but you can't listen to all the way through 'cause you'll start to babble and hyperventilate and pray for a soothing Kraftwerk moment or something. And all those words! Look, a girl's gotta have reference points. And, look, "Columnated ruins domino" versus "Unleavened profundity loafbread." What's the difference? Well, I guess the difference is time: with Circle I can't hide under my rock historian's hat, cause it's from the scary present, albeit lurking with ghosts from the Folkways back catalog and early LSD experiments. The album settles into nostalgic, detuned grooves for what seems like a few seconds before someone throws the radio out of a window and two voices clamor for your addled attention, and you're informed that, "Jesus wasn't a carpenter, he was a gardener" over some mean and low whirrs and thumps ("Questions Over Coffee"). You turn the stereo up to hear voices in the distance and a faraway tiki tune, then you're stunned by a military drumbeat, a burst of guitar noise or even just a rhythm that makes your shoulders move... for all of two minutes, before the next interlude of whistling and weirdness hits. When unsupported by more conventional samples and rhythms, Doseone's free-flowing paranoid meta-babble (babble is a compliment right now) almost never sounds forced, doing the universe, the animals, religion and childhood like a skewed new age guru intent on screwing your mind. With the Boom Bip-led tracks, this is alleviated by the crazy rightness of the music, but only damn just, only in the sense that there's a bit more to concentrate on. Together, the two work like a beautiful bad dream, getting a found sound that only comes about with obsessive construction. I know little of this music. Maybe someone will tell me it sucks, it's nothing special, that there's a whole fucking shop full of this hybrid visionary psych-hop. I do hope so. Just tell me where. - Careless Talk Costs Lives |
2XLP/Out Of Print