| Hip-hop isn't dead yet, only dying slowly. Like every new musical trend in the past ten years that has received airplay, it was summarily subjected to overexposure and then drained dry of any creative life in order to fit a popular (read: wide-selling) format. Most hip-hop artists were forced to resort more and more to gimmicks in order to sell their music, to cram their square peg into an increasingly round hole. It's with no small sense of irony, then, that cLOUDDEAD opens up Ten with a "Pop Song." Rest easy, however; the fellas in one of the most notorious hip-hop collectives of all time ever haven't gone all Usher just yet. "Pop Song" is altogether more accessible than previous cLOUDDEAD, but it still contains all of the weirdness and surprising beauty that fans of the band's self-titled first album have come to expect. The track starts with Doseone and why? trading off bizarre lines until a high-pitched hum (and background gang vocals) gradually takes over the mix and provides a chord structure for the slowed-down beats and droning keys that come in. As soon as the slightly conventional beat takes, the two begin trading lines again, this time even going as far as to complete each other's sentences. So far, so conventional. Thankfully, the track (as with the album as a whole) gets weirder and better as it progresses, eventually dropping all the beats for cut-up and sped-up samples of speech and a thick haze that features the pair's vocals swathed in echo and blips that sound like sonars in the ocean. Eventually, the beat comes back in and is ridden nearly to end, where it's again dropped in favor of more droning keys and a barely intelligible sound sample. The track perfectly distills cLOUDDEAD's unique approach into what actually does kind of turn out to be a five-minute pop song. It would be worth the price of the entire album, were the entire album not nearly so great in and of itself. As a music critic, I've never really had any trouble summarizing or describing (and also dismissing) an album through several cleverly-placed words. Try as I might, I can't dismiss this album. I only know that I like it, and that it's so intriguing that I continually find myself tuning and listening to it over and over again. It would be tempting (and tremendously frustrating) to describe every track on the album, but as with all great art and artists, it's merely something you have to hear for yourself. I read once where an artist was saying that they would drown everything in reverb, so you couldn't tell how the music sounded, but only how it felt. That's as perfect a description for cLOUDDEAD's music as I can think of; each track has its own unique vision, its own self-contained feel, a mixture of queasy, seasick atmospheres combined with slowed-down, drugged-up beats and odd, stream-of-consciousness narration that's more like descriptive essays than actual lyrics. The album plays like some dream that's half-remembered upon waking: you're not sure what it was, whether it was good or bad or even indifferent, but you only know that you want to get back to it, and soon. - Delusions of Adequacy |
1XLP/Out Of Print