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The tribe pinnacle Anti-Pop Consortium are underground hip-hop's most
hallowed and hyped, feeling the love from Warp's wallet while other
beyond-qualified cats like Cannibal Ox and Aesop Rock have to keep
making like labor daysing Donna Summers. The Tragic Epilogue,
the APC's first longplaying outing, was a fucking hip-hop monument in
the two-triple-o; and now with endorsement coming from the home of
Vincent Gallo, and with alla those Brit-issued ad-hoc glossy-paged
dead-tree denizens of anticipated cool surely telling the kids
hip-hop don't scale no higher heights than this, the cats come back
with Arrhythmia, their self-conscious study of costume-draped
intergalactic hip-hop, high on the lined white and strung out along
strung lines of "artistic" designs. Their debut was a triumph of
tightly rhyming, verbose vocalism, Priest and Beans being
card-carrying members of the proudly poetic Nuyorican clique. This
time around fifth-Beatle-with-the-mad-beats Earl Blaize has gone to
town with the abstract-electro-isms, leaving the vocalists humbly
mumbling abstracted verses as asides and shouting those silly
Anti-Pop anthems when the time is right ("We Kill Soap Scum" the
latest motto in that show-no-teeth style), while the E-Blaize
regurgitates the Warp back-cat he got sent upon the dotted line being
signed, jostling hip-hop's flippers so hard the whole thing comes
close to tilting. And the consorshum know that to masturbate is to
create, and Arrhythmia's arrhythmic self-referential parlance must've
given them tired wrists. Beans and Priest and M.Sayyid speak in a
language whose streamed self-conscious sub-consciousness is equal
parts pretension and contention, fondly remembering a back-in-the-day
before MC was a dirty word whilst thinking only of the future hip-hop
they're med-fed making. The buzzed jolts coming from Blaize's
beat-making mischief are like zaps to the temples of old-skool's
sealed-up mausoleum, and the buzz-and-hum beats come like convulsed
spasms of electroshock, the Anti-Pop Consortium hoping to keep one
foot in rap traditionalism while trying to drag hip-hop into some
sci-fi future. While this is admirable, invariably you kinda hope
they'd make like Saul Williams or Radioinactive or Clouddead and just
leave earthly concerns behind. But Arrhythmia is not the work of
cosmic dreamers, it's made specifically for this atmosphere here, and
breathes in the self-generating hot air it billows like a vicious
cycle of self-consumption. APC don't float in no gravity-free dreams,
they're here and now in the wonderful-world-of-me, and fueled by this
solipsistic self-belief, they strap the whole of hip-hop to their
broad backs, looking to lug it into a future-music musical future.
Now, how do you rate this weight that they carry?
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