| Were you aware that Abraham Lincoln never got offed and minnows have teeth in their throats? cLOUDDEAD release their second album as a revelation, not only of these self-swallowing fables, but also of the sort of musical detour that has been camouflaged with dirt and rotten rap for the better part of a decade. The three-piece are masters of their craft and though they bravely face the influential schools of hip-hop and trip-hop on the album it would be insulting to simply slip them into the void left between the two. Ten is sample-heavy, but more gratifying than their ability to make little girls' voices into a rhythm track or the oft-painfully slow drums, is the non-stop lyrics. The vocals are in different orbits, windmilling each other propelling the song from an otherwise pretty fantastic track into an otherworldly folk tale. The hip-hop tag falls to the floor after "Pop Song" comes to a juddering halt - the beats are there, but there's something almost sinisterly against the rules, and "The Teen Keen Skip" twists its mentalist samples and nursery rhyme sing-along into an entirely different beast. cLOUDDEAD have their fun ("The Velvet Ant" is apparently a bizarre account of a day in the life of goats on basketball courts), but there's sobriety (gun crime, war, and omnipresent references to dead dogs). "Son of a Gun" and "Rifle Eyes" both spit their venom in the general direction of something murky, if not entirely morbid, but never self-referential, so in turn, entirely refreshing. The samples are left-field (Phil Elvrum, Flying Saucer Attack, and tapes from car boot sales), and the result, while not perfectly formed, is perfectly headed there, as they say "from the ground to utter nonsense up." Bravo. - The Stereo Effect |
1XLP/Out Of Print