| And so the avant-rap scene burps up its murkiest, most challenging offering yet. Three members of California-via-Cincinnati hip-hop collective Anticon - rappers Doseone and why? and producer odd nosdam - gathered together a year or so back, armed with shitty samplers and notebooks full of eerie poetics. Their mission? To fill two sides of ten-inch vinyl with the most abstract, mind-bending noise they could muster. Six super-rare EPs later, and these much-whispered-about recordings are compiled together for the general populace to try and digest. It isn't, by any means, easy listening. The music contained herein takes the most abstract fallout of trip-hop as its starting point, working in white noise, telephone pranks and post-rock textures to create a disorientating mush of a record you'll spend weeks getting lost in. It's not for everyone, as the marmite-esque partisan reactions it has prompted in this very office prove. But this is pure, beautiful music, for those who can acclimatize to the bizarre sonic terrain. Doseone and why?'s vocals run unheard gamuts, often taking in Marvin Gaye-esque soul-squeals, plantation chants and Rakim-on-Ritalin rhymeflows, while nosdam's patchworks veer between dreamy blissouts and nightmarish bruises of discord (see "JimmyBreeze" for evidence). Defying any description, vaulting all boundaries, cLOUDDEAD are utterly essential. - NME |
3XLP/Out Of Print