Vast Aire wants you to talk to him like one half of an Ox, making sure you know
his first solo foray is just an on-the-side side; the demise of Cannibal
Ox a scurrilous rumor best be put back to bed where the biters night's
are bugging. But maybe you already knew that, like you knew "the third
movie of 'The Matrix' was gonna be wack," and you'd never forget that
even as this Vast Aire solo gear plays it much straighter than the wild-eyed
fry-ups cooking circuitry on the Can-Ox beat-boxes. For much of the time,
he shadowboxes through nothing different to all the regular braggadocio
and slander blowing hip-hop's mouses down, shooting off-the-lip with
straight-shooting straight-up old-skooler boasts — "I be at the
cypher/ Niggas salute me/ I'm fly like Woodstock/ You crawl like Snoopy" — then
casting such a cast-down eye on the Home of the Slave currently contemplating
tattooing bar-codes across his blackened brow, asking of it, rhetorically "who
killed 98% of all my Indian peoples/ And turned Egyptian towers into
Christian steeples?" It's only on more intermittent occasions where Aire
deflates the chest and loosens the tongue up enough to tangle through
the silly syllables that recall's Can-Ox's most momentous moments, where
Vast's vernacular can pirouette with a dancer's lack of inhibition, even
if, in one such moment, his salivating "We all scream for ice cream/
We all scream for Vast Aire's light-beams" tastes like a spat-out serving
from Beans. It ain't really until the closing credits that his credentials
are dared revealed, his closing-credit spoken outro outing VA as an AV-dork
dressed up in hip-hopper's threads, as he threads from showering affection
upon his fellow fellows to showing romantic attachments to his gear,
concluding with the deluded dedications: "I gotta say peace to the SP
1200, the MPC 6, the MPC 2000, the EPS 16+, the ASR 10, the Shaw mic,
and the Avalon hookup, y'all know the deal, the 880, 1680, 1880, y'all
know Pro-Tools!" Yeah, and we all know The Cold Vain, too, and
can tap it any time we want. And like tap water, that disc is flowing;
and that's something likely known by anyone casting an ear to this here.
So, here's to swimming upstream.
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