MUSH RECORDS TOUR
Backpacker's, tonight's for you. Composed of MCs Why?, Odd Nosdam and Doseone, and with lyrics as impenetrable as Finnegans Wake, cLOUDDEAD make just about any crew look square on their hallucinatory, hilarious and beautiful eponymous record. Favoring analog organs pitch-bendered and filtered behind meandering slow-poke beats, cLOUDDEAD come at you subliminally with flows that get staggered, tag-teamed or puréed into gorgeously unintelligible collages. The technique not only works, it's transcendent when coupled with the slow-burning horns two-thirds through the album (they don't bother naming their tracks) as if pill popped prophets stumbled into a spaghetti-western opera. Radioinactive are those rare MCs who can get bugged out and make heads bang. Their latest release, Pyrimidi, is rife with rhymes wrapping themselves around oboe, zither, church choir or a crackly vinyl sample slowed to 12RPM. Check for Boom Bip, a mad hatter who piles velvety waves and sensual slabs on top of glitchy-hard skittery beats--oh, he's also the first signee at Lex, the new imprint of Warp Records.
ANDREW LENTZ