| OK, Here's the thing - my knowledge of today's hip-hop underground is about three shades higher than sweet-fuck-all. Yeah, I was into Public Enemy, Ice-T and N.W.A. back in the day, just like other "cool" folks my age. But aside from occasionally nodding my head to a track by Cypress Hill or the Roots or (yeah, I'll admit it) Eminem as I flip past Much Music, I'm basically completely out of touch with today's hip-hop and rap scene. So until I had this disc brought to my attention via its being licenced by Ninja Tune, I'd not really heard much about cLOUDDEAD or the group's three members, Doseone, why?, and odd nosdam. All I knew was that the six ten-inch EPs that are compiled on this disc were supposedly tearing up the forward thinking fringes of the hip-hop underground for the last year or so. Scrounging up some mp3 samples, I became both confused and intrigued. And now, after spending a couple of weeks with the full album, I'm asking myself how the hell it took me so long to get clued in! To coin a cliche, cLOUDDEAD is to hip-hop as David Lynch is to cinema or William Burroughs is to literature. The two basic components of rap, beats and rhymes, seem to be there. Except that the beats are sometimes obscured or replaced with waves of sick ambience, ethereal samples, and other alien sounds. As for the rhymes, they don't really rhyme, and they don't make a lot of sense either. "I taught myself to survive a four story fall wearing a space suit and a dead Englishman's socks" is a particularly good example of what you can expect to hear, assuming you can discern what they're saying through the layers of sonic sludge that is often piled on top. If Coil were to produce a hip-hop record, it would probably sound something like cLOUDDEAD. I'd love to write much more about this record, but quite frankly, I can't think of any further descriptive phrases that could do it justice. It's simply one of the most unique, original and utterly remarkable albums I've heard in a long time. If you have any interest whatsoever in artists who are pushing the envelope of music - not just hip-hop or electronic music, but music in general - then you really, really owe it to yourself to check out this record. - Feedback Monitor |
3XLP/Out Of Print