| Seems like producer-driven hip-hop records are usually only as strong as their guest MCs lately, and it has to be said that if given the choice of picking any track to highlight from Thavius Beck’s Thru, it’s best to gravitate toward a two-and-a-half-minute instrumental. When you can’t even follow half the cats on the record for more than a few bars because they’re more interested in playing Tetris with suffixes than, I dunno, rhyming about something tangible, that’s not good. (And I’ve gotten to the point where I can figure out at least two-thirds of what El-P’s yammering about, so I have a fairly high tolerance for that kind of shit.) Eliminating those leaves you with a cut where Nocando rhymes about his father’s bout with cancer, which is powerful stuff but not the kind of thing I’d feel right attaching a number to. As far as the instrumentals go, most of the album’s on some kind of sci-fi laserblast IDM/junglist/crunk/grime committee meeting action, and this cut’s the best of ’em: the beat’s a drag race between Dirty South and drum ’n’ bass, with early ’90s rave and/or mid-’70s prog synths supplying the melody and a plodding thud of digital guitar notes acting like some sort of super-slo-mo rudimentary non-solo. If there’s anyone who still does mash-ups out there, have someone weld this to a T.I. acapella and watch heads explode. - Paper Thin Walls |
1XLP/Out Of Print