| While essentially a hip-hop album at heart, Exquisite Corpse may be a little hard to work through for traditional hip-hop heads. Using jazz and popular song from the 30s and 40s as its base, the beats are at times faint and textured, sometimes bass-heavy and driving, and sometimes electronic and glitch-heavy. An impressive lineup of guest stars graces these tracks - MF Doom and Sci provide some straight-ahead rhymes, Laura Darling and Mike Ladd bring some lyrical depth, and Prefuse 73 and Hrishikesh Hirway collaborate on production. Daedelus' perspective and style are refreshingly unique. The songs are dense. Melodies fall in and out of complex rhythms, while lyrics, samples, electronic sounds, and scratching, fill up all available frequencies. Sometimes cacophonous and diffuse, sometimes pretty, melodic and focused, Exquisite Corpse is musical experimentation at its most heady and inspired. This is the type of expansive, interesting innovation that hip-hop desperately needs in order to stay afloat. This is a good album that seems to only scratch the surface of Daedelus' capabilities. I look forward to hearing what comes out of him next. - Signal to Noise |
1XLP/Out Of Print