| Ever since De La Soul brought dancing daisies to rap in the late 1980s, hip-hop has had its rule benders: outsiders pushing the standard lexicon beyond the subjects of Cristal, cars and chronic. cLOUDDEAD are a trio of iMac daddies from Oakland, California, who are using laptop electronics to rewire rap's circuitry to grids that crackle with cool. They are white, encyclopaedically literate and their debut album featured solos played on a kitchen blender. The most unsettling fact, however, is that their vaporous sound is wholly uncategorisable, even in the world of left-field hip-hop. Ten is a dark and disorientating album: the rappers Doseone and why? are the sort of angst-ridden rhymers who only have to glance down at the pavement to see "The x-ray of someone's tumoured skull / Left to scream from the gutter." All doomy, nebulous ruminations, their egghead quasiphilosophy is stuff for strong hearts alone, as are their vocal deliveries, which form an organic counterpoint to the music, with tongue clicks for beats and broken harmonies for rhythm. What prevents Ten from descending into a dense, neuralgic stew, though, is the odd propulsive tune that surfaces above the beatless glitch. The stand-out track, "Dead Dogs Two," explores the morbid glamour of car crash victims, but it does so over woozy synths and ear-nuzzling micropatterns that buzz as insistently as insects in a jar. "Physics of a Unicycle" may be the most ludicrously named hip-hop song, but it is also dark, brooding and makes compulsive listening. As hip-hop's answer to the equally impressionistic Boards of Canada, cLOUDDEAD are a band of perverse samplemeisters whose music demands the prefixes "avant" or "quasi." But the results of their rebellious rule-bending remain both admirable and intriguing - as are the sleevenotes, which reveal that Ten is the last album from a trio who have already split up. - The Times |
1XLP/Out Of Print