| The liner notes for the long-awaited follow-up to cLOUDDEAD's debut declares the making of the album has "been very emotional," before the schizophrenic coda: "Yoni thinks this is our last album. Adam definitely does not. David remains optimistic." Who can figure out cLOUDDEAD? Following the release of their eponymous self-titled debut, the cLOUDDEAD trio (Doseone, why?, and odd nosdam) emerged as the core of the nascent Anticon stable as well as one of the most polarizing forces in new hip-hop. Their breed of lo-fi, frequently beatless ambience, laced with arrhythmic, nasally Caucasian whining and genre-bending instrumentation were equally compelling and confounding, depending on who you asked. Mercilessly strange, Ten is as much of a puzzle as anything by Anticon. Stylistically, it is of a piece with the first cLOUDDEAD record, although the trio have gone to pains to make this album more cohesive, less wandering than their debut. If anything, Ten is more possessing of an unabashed pop sensibility than anything on Anticon so far, which makes it as good a place as any for the uninitiated to begin. But die-hard fans need not worry - Ten delivers what's expected of it. The lyrics, neither sung nor rapped, still possess the kind of rubbery love of spoken language usually reserved for poetry of the "Jabberwocky" school and mostly are held together by the associative logic of surrealist exquisite corpse experimentation. The production is tight, polished and inventive, and stands on its own apart from the lyrics it is designed to showcase. Ultimately, Ten is best enjoyed by utterly ignoring the debate about whether this peculiar aesthetic is hip-hop at all. In the end, who cares? Ten has more in kind with the playful nihilism of Negativland and long-gone, genreless vinyl oddities of decades past, like the stoned-out, socially conscious sketch-comedy of the Firesign Theater, than it has with any kind of music being produced today - hip-hop or otherwise. - Daily Texan |
1XLP/Out Of Print