It's pretty pissy to talk about anything being a "breakthrough"
album, but there's some collected perception that this Clouddead
record will be the one to capture larger recognition for San
Francisco hip-hop collective Anticon, despite the fact
that it could be the strange crew's strangest record yet. Originally
issued as a string of six 10-inch singles, the record finds Why?, Odd
Nosdam, Dose One and numerous assorted helpers traipsing through
dense, foggy, almost-droning, utterly murky and resolutely un-hip-hop
hip-hop environs. Recorded on the cheapest of Tascam four-tracks, it
proudly bares its low-cost inceptions in its thick and fissured
moods. In a way, the record almost seems like a hip-hop equivalent to
lo-fi confessionalism or post-psychedelic guitar-drone, with Dose and
Why?'s spry, lithe, literary lyrical turns buried deep under
disconcertingly loud vinyl crackles and machine hum; the quirky quips
of their metafictional, self-reflexive, un-urban, mic-clutching
poetry sometimes seem to merely "rise up" through the musical mist.
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