| Left-field hip-hop trio blasts out a fierce new collage for kids in college. Music has never sounded like this; Ten must have come from the future of some alternate reality. It was a little over three years ago when I bought my first Anticon artist album. The disc was Sole's Bottle of Humans, a dismal journey into the tortured emotions of one white emcee's life. I had heard about this new crew of Midwestern-bred Caucasian hip-hoppers who rapped about deep issues and thoughts and figured something this different was worth checking out. At a time when no one gave any pale-skinned mic-spitter (besides Eminem) the time of day, there arose deep in the underground some seriously unique and heartfelt hip-hop music. Today, with Aesop Rock, El-P and Atmosphere blowing up, white rappers' pictures are on magazines, their videos are on TV, and their CDs are easily finding their ways into more and more kids' collections. It is now that cLOUDDEAD releases a follow-up to their debut album (which was really a collection of ten-inch records - check the history!). When they released their music on CD for the first time, its abstract beauty blew the taboo off the whole emotional white boy rhyme/rant stigma. Now, I'm serious when I admit to you that when I first started collecting Anticon and Mush releases by way-off-the-beaten-path artists, people HATED them. Sole had been dissed on record by El-P and Anticon was thought of as a sappy joke. But this music sounded like no hip-hop I had ever encountered, and I ate it up. (I usually root for the underdogs anyway.) I didn't care that no one would listen to it with me, it was better to soak in alone anyhow. I started buying every left-field Anticon release I could when no one else even knew about them. Then cLOUDDEAD's album dropped and, all of a sudden, people who never heard an Anticon release previously were buying it and touting it all over town. "Grrrrr," I growled, "my overlooked hip-hop heroes aren't making personal soundtracks just for me anymore." How did this happen? A friend gave me the album... Oh. Doseone, why?, and odd nosdam cram what sounds like twenty different songs into each of the twelve tracks. No one can understand cLOUDDEAD's music in one listen. Don't be deceived, it's not just schizophrenic, otherworldly and indecipherable. After multiple listens meaning is revealed or can be interpreted by the listener. The producer is odd nosdam, loved by listeners with short attention spans everywhere. His first solo album plan 9… meat your hypnotis was more than an hour long with fifty-five "sketches," usually clocking in around a minute each. The beauty of odd's production lies in his usage of the most unconventional samples and gritty beats creating music layered so thick you get upset that a melody is over after forty-five seconds and will never reappear. Last year's No More Wig for Ohio is more structured, with longer instrumentals, and is nearly flawless. The emcees in the trio are Doseone and why?. why? released one solo album Oaklandazulasylum, is a member of the group Reaching Quiet and has contributed guest vocals to many of his Anticon-patriots' projects. Doseone is the more prolific of the two, having collaborated with Boom Bip, been a member of the groups Greenthink (with why?), Deep Puddle Dynamics, Themselves and Subtle, in addition to cLOUDDEAD. Most of these releases feature his trademark hyper-nasal sing-songy insanity. Anticon music is an acquired taste, and Doseone is the supreme example of this fact. The thing is the man can rhyme. Check 1998's Hemispheres if you don't believe me. That is the only Doseone product I have heard in which he strictly sticks to the original hip-hop method of emceeing, and it blows 95% of his practiced peers out of the water. These three artists collaborate on Ten to achieve stunning results. I call them artists because they are by no means traditional emcees or Djs. cLOUDDEAD do not merely tell stories over beats like every other rap act out there. They paint sonic patterns and flood the listener's mind with images, feelings and thoughts. I have refrained from describing the new album in detail for two reasons: 1) I don't want to spoil anything, and 2) There is no way to communicate my awe in words. Instead, I've given you the succinct history above to show you that this is not just some new rap group with the latest style. These guys have put in work and if you hear their new release and enjoy it, go back in time. Study your recent history, and find out how they got here. Ten gets 9.5 nimbus smashers out of 10 possible cirrus stranglers. - Canned |
1XLP/Out Of Print