| Hip-hop monkeyshines have never sounded so fine. In some assumedly shitty sharehouse in Los Angeles. I'm guessing that there's something in the water, as, on the communed communing of out-hip-hop types Busdriver and Radioinactive and playful-electro type Daedelus, there's something magical at play: like mops marching with buckets, or grown men crying, or comedy becoming profundity over time, or time itself. It's not by sleight-of-hand, either, that this disc is so good it makes my eyes pop and my socks hop. Like playing every possession like it's the final one, The Weather finds that hard work and hustle is fun. The record sounds like a manic, comic, wacky, smoked-out cut-and-paste party, but the mixes and lyrics herein are seriously labored on. While Busdriver and Radioinactive swap manic-mouthed ad-hoc off-the-wall rhymes in butch/fey voices that remind of the classic comic juxtaposition of the big-dog/small-dog in childhood cartoons. Daedelus makes monkeyish with the cartoon music, swapping samples culled from the retrofuturist post-war/ cold-war time in which robots seemed set to play a part in our lives. Speaking of warring, the album - the first big blue-ribbon hip-hop disc of the year, for certain - has plenty of thoughtful thoughts on the state of the mixed-up modern-world and is current critical condition: sentiments of gun-culture and the idiocy of mass-media and the power of the oil-trade and mass public paranoia all tossed into the record's postmodernist/hip-hopist blender. So as well as being good for you, it tastes great, too. - Grooves |
2XLP/Out Of Print