| While the generous coterie of guests joining Daedelus (Alfred Weisberg-Roberts) on Exquiste Corpse suggests a radical step for the LA composer, it's in fact more of an incremental and in hindsight logical move. Of Snowdonia (Plug Research) showcased his idiosyncratic flair for merging archaic vinyl kitsch and contemporary beats into jarring collages, while A Gent Agent (Laboratory Instinct) injected a stronger dose of hip-hop and jungle into the mix. And while the inclusion of emcees on Exquiste Corpse might seem new, Daedelus featured Busdriver on the Something Bells twelve-inch and guests like Pigeon John and Saul Williams appeared on the Adventure Time outing Dreams of Water Themes. His fourth full-length might more accurately be broached as a confluence of directions Daedelus has been pursuing the past few years. Yes, he still has a jones for decades-old samples, a fact nowhere more evident than in instrumental bricolage like "Dearly Departed" and the Cuban-flavoured "Fallen Love." Boasting a lumbering lurch boosted to fortissimo levels by dramatic horn blasts, the lounge outing "The Crippled Hand" might be the most memorable of the three, though Scott Herren's Prefuse 73 production turn on "Welcome Home" sounds as good. Admittedly, Herren can do this kind of thing in his sleep by now but that doesn't diminish its potency; his sliced female coos and lush funk beats sparkle delectably (that same vocal, in a less chopped form, sweetens a second, head-nodding version of the song featuring poet Mike Ladd's laconic delivery). The vocal tracks range more broadly. Interestingly, the pairing of an emcee with Daedelus's eccentric backing might sound like an unpromising combination on paper but the results are often refreshing. MF Doom's flow dovetails nicely with Daedelus's salsa-tinged groove of syrupy strings and voice samples on "Impending Doom" while an unwavering and sparser base in "Drops" proves ideal for Miami group Cyne. Hrishikesh Hirway (the One AM Radio) performs vocal acrobatics in the first part of the folk-flavoured "Thanatopsis" before a smoother delivery meets a stumbling drum track. More calming by comparison is "Now & Sleep" a time-weathered lullaby featuring Laura Darling's soothing vocal. And, oh yes, that oh-so-fitting title. The name actually comes from a game that was popular with Surrealism artists where one person writes a word or phrase on a piece of paper, folds it, passes it on to another to do the same, and so on, with the predictable result a collage of words that makes little conventional sense yet acts as a creative springboard; needless to say, one of the initial products was the statement "the exquisite corpse shall drink the new wine," hence the album title. Just as the game suggests ties to dada and John Cage, so too does Daedelus's album feature similarly bold moments of experimental collage, to varyingly disjunctive degrees. - Textura |
1XLP/Out Of Print