| Precisely 2:38 into cLOUDDEAD's debut album, rapper Doseone drops a line so potent it crystallizes the raison d'etre lurking in this fabulous rhymester's mind: "Do you know how many times I thought about writing about the paper I'm writing on?" Central to Doseone's philosophy, and shared by a growing underground multitude studiously constructing a new rap order, is the prying away of rap from the regressive constraints surrounding it. An integral part of West Coast hip-hop collective Anticon, cLOUDDEAD (a collaboration between Doseone, why?, and odd nosdam) have defied rap's borders by removing themselves from the preoccupations of matter and groove. So much avant garde rap is created against mainstream rap's stylistic Goliaths, sometimes it reflects back their bullying glare of tradition, roots, consciousness, reality, and materialism. Making no apologies for deploying ethereal, borderless beats, they cut loose from hip-hop's headnod regulations to let the music float free, the heavy certainty of hip-hop - its familiar pillars of hard sound - vaporized into a gravity free zone. The opening "apt. A (1)" slows a primary drum pattern until its once pure beat is microscopically dissected, each reverberation lightened by the lack of gravity. cLOUDDEAD's use of drums keeps you swaying rather than nodding. Tracks like "(cloud dead number five) (1&2)" conjure a stellar wasteland replete with rogue digitized vocals wafting in like tumbleweeds. Good as the music is however, the album's most captivating element is its free verse lyrics. Bouncing off Freestyle Fellowship, cLOUDDEAD switches speeds in a free indirect discourse connecting their tangential quips. The ethereal lyrics render cLOUDDEAD as a well worked, three way meet of traditional poetry, rap, and beat science. - Wire |
3XLP/Out Of Print