| Meet Yoni and David, they're nice guys of the oft stepped-on variety. They're also artists, which doesn't really help. As two-thirds of avant-hop electro trippers cLOUDDEAD and two-eighths of the East Bay indie-rap collective Anticon, they've carved names for themselves as rhymester why? and producer odd nosdam. As Reaching Quiet (yet another permutation), the two create a unique blend of lo-fi crunchiness, indie-rock goodness and hip-hop realness (just kidding... sort of). Ever the crate-digger, nosdam offers his fondness for ancient samples and beat-tapping while why? provides the wit, the croon and most of the instrumentation (drums, keys, guitar). Thirty tracks divided into four movements, In the Shadow of the Living Room is the duo's answer to Bob Dylan and Public Enemy. The music is dark and disturbing at times but whimsical and light at others: the perfect counterpart to why?'s poetry, which drifts from a frustration with symmetry, to an ex-lover's pleas to "play Parcheesi until it's evening," to the proper semantics to use whilst robbing a Wal-Mart. The most tragically beautiful moment on the record comes with the wrist-slittingly morbid "Broken Crow" a stomach-turning look at "slow death in the Midwest." "By the time the snow is melting they always find four or five bodies hanging by belts from the train trestles or in empty parking lots slit wrists turning what's left of the snow into cherry Slushy." If you're in high spirits though, you might rather hear the deceptively upbeat "You Choke" - why?'s bitter diatribe against Western civilization. In short, there's a song for every mood. A patchwork quilt of bleeding emotion, dark humor and weighty instrumentation pieced together to tuck in America's mistrustful and misunderstood middleclass droves, living room is the muffled cry of the nice guy... an ode to the working stiff not sure where he stands or why he keeps getting screwed. - Campus Circle |
2XLP/Out Of Print