clipping. - Taking Off Track Review

I recently had the pleasure of attending the Pitchfork Music Festival in Chicago. The first performer on Saturday was a rapper named Ka. I love his music - and his live show did not disappoint. He's a brilliant poet and lyricist. The most memorable part of his set was not one of his songs, though. It was a spoken interlude to his awesome track "Jungle." Sidenote: if you haven't checked out Ka or his LP The Night's Gambit, you should. Anyway, Ka described his hometown of Brownsville, a neighborhood in Brooklyn, NYC, in quite 'real' terms, so to speak. Ka dedicated "Jungle" to all of the friends he lost during the summer. He said that it gets hot in Brownsville and "people are stacked on top of each other" - that a lot of people get frustrated with their situation and "jus' start shootin'" [sic].

If Ka's interlude describes the abstract situation of of living life in the "Jungle." Then clipping.'s track "Taking Off" gives voice to a few characters that live there. Clipping.'s emcee, Daveed Diggs, delivers a harshly realistic vision of unnamed places in three rapid fire verses he drops with surgical precision and virtuosic flows. Daveed's verses are so intense they deserve detailed dissections and study to fully grasp their content and meaning. Dissections I won't delve too deeply into here, but suffice it to say that you'll be looking up the clipping.'s RapGenius page for hours if you like their music as much as I do.

Verse 1 has a rhythmic pattern that sounds as though it were taken from a snare drum exercise book. The song itself is set around 80 BPM in 4/4. The first six lines are delivered as largely eighth-notes. The next 3 or 4 lines are delivered as eighth-note triplets. The next 4 lines are delivered as sixteenth-notes at blistering speeds. Then the entire pattern I just described is repeated to conclude the verse while each half of the first verse is 8 bars long.

Lyrically, the first 8 bars describe the life of a killer in cold, factual terms. The second 8 bars describe the emotional aftermath of that sort of life on the killer himself. Throughout the rest of the song, Daveed continues with the murderer as a theme, describing where this sort of person grows up, why they are the way they are, and why people trun to such a lifestyle. This sort of attention to detail and orderedness continue throughout the track, though the first verse stands as a sort of perfect example of Daveed's amazing delivery, planning, and complex wordplay.

Musically, clipping. are noise-hop. The two instrumentalists, Jonathan Snipes and William Hutson, bring their own unique brand of dark, sparse, noise-centric beats to the table for "Taking Off" and it works perfectly to accentuate Daveed's brilliance. The strong noise element of clipping. in general deserves more than a passing comment I think. What interests me most, and for now will have to be an underdeveloped line of thinking, is that the noise element of clipping. fits so well with Daveed's gritty portrayal of life on the street that it is more consistent than a lot of other "gangsta rap." That is to say, what is usually the case in rap is that a rapper will describe dark themes of poverty, crime, exploitation over music that makes it palatable to a large audience. With clipping., however, there is no safe way to palliate what one hears: the beat and music accompanying the harsh lyrics are equally as harsh. It gives clipping.'s music a sort of x-factor whereby it is sometimes difficult to listen to and quite upsetting. This is the same sort of feeling I get from Death Grips, which makes clipping. especially exciting insofar as Death Grips broke up.

In "Taking Off," then, clipping. gives us a dark insight into life in the "Jungle" quite unlike anything I've heard before. It makes it quite a joyful experience in the darkest meaning of that statement as is possible. "Taking Off" furthermore shows the listener that, as long as we have poverty, we will have killers: a lesson worth remembering.

Rating: 8.5/10

Listen:

 

Indian - From All Purity Album Review

Indian's new From All Purity release is like a crash you cannot help but look at even if you don't want to. I think this album is the perfect soundtrack to a slaughterhouse - it is: vile; horrifying; hopeless; and generally fucked up. There is no parting of the clouds - it's all darkness - and almost none of this album is melodic. The lyrics don't help either: "all I want is repetition," "I can't change," "all disease, anxiety, obsession is perfect/like a compliment from all purity," "What's done to me will be done to you." I don't think that I've heard anything as nihilistic as this thing in my life.

I;m sure if I should have any gripes with this record - maybe that there is no hope in this music? I'm not sure if this album espouses a revolutionary nihilism or if it is a political quietest nihilism. I get the sense that it's the latter, and that's a bit bothersome. Contrarily, even if the lyrics point in this direction, there is still something nice about this record. It makes you look at the filth of the world, remind you that it's there. If the elementary gesture of late capitalist ideology is the move of fetishistic disavowal: 'I know very well that there are slaughterhouses, but nonetheless I will go on acting as if there are not so that I can live normally' - then this album is the shock that breaks one out of that spell, if even for a moment. The song "Clarify" is especially perfect in this regard. It's legitimately terrifying - the track turns my stomach. And that's the point, to unsettle you. At least for me, it made me think.

I mean, "the rape within" is the final lyric of the aptly named song, "Rape." It is wretched and screamed over and over and is more terrifying than any American Horror Story episode could ever dream of being. This is music taken to the extreme, and it's incredible. It's gut wrenching. It's crushing in the best way. I can't help but love this album. I think "Directional" is my favorite song for the sake of the music's extremity alone. That's the point of this album too, not exactly what is said in the screams is the takeaway for me, it's the effect this album has on me and my morbid fascination with it that make me love it. Just like the recent White Suns release, this LP is not for the faint of heart. You might also consider turning the volume down before you hit play on the first track. My God.

Hits: "The Impetus Bleeds," "Directional," "Clarify"

Misses: the abrupt ending to "Disambiguation"

Rating: 8/10

White Suns - Totem Album Review

Whoa. This LP is not for the faint of heart. My God, this thing is a roller coaster. One that will throw you off if you don't hold on tight. The acapella screaming on the track "Clairvoyant" is just such a discordant and gut wrenching moment. The screams, here, are some of the most intense expressions of emotions I think I've ever heard. The acapella screams even express their own philosophy of religion: "My God's face is made of mirrors;" "My God's face looks like my Father's." Basically what we have there is the idea that what we see in God is wish-fulfillment of the lost object of desire - Freud and Lacan would be proud.

The intermittent noise, dissonant ambience on tracks like "Line of Smoke," and bursts of extremely violent sounds emanating from tortured guitars make this band's extreme form of noise rock the Platonic Form of the term "acquired taste." That said, I distinctly remember performing John Paulson's "Epinicion" in high school concert band and expressing the same emotion but enjoying the hell out of it. That was an easy listen for me. Even atonal classical music can be enjoyable if listened to from a certain perspective. Moreover, I get the sense while I listen to this album that the raw emotion and expressiveness this music takes to perform is immense. These observations allowed me to really dig this album by my third listen. Perhaps they can help you with this LP as well.

At least for me, this album represents the abstract sense of how the world is today. I mean that seriously. "Pathways strictly defined" - the walling off of the bourgeoisie, "Control!" - via ideology, global capitalism has a "World Lock" quite literally. The chaos of White Suns' sound is born out the objective violence of unfairness - that a few people are born into a situation where they become wealthy, only leaving the scraps of pity and charity for the proletariat to fight over - thus solidifying the power of the bourgeoisie more. The vicious cycle of cut-throat competition is expressed in pattered sound.

I really don't know what else to say about this record. There is no real way to prepare you for the listen. Just do it, I suppose.

Hits: "Priest in the Laboratory," "World Lock," "Fossil Record," "Clairvoyant," "Line of Smoke," "Carrion"

Misses: "Prostrate" and "Cathexis" are just okay to good for me?

8.5/10

Buy this thing!

Have a Nice Life - The Unnatural World Album Review

I'm somewhat glad that Have a Nice Life kept their sophomore album under 50 minutes: if they hadn't I might have become far too depressed to enjoy the LP as much as I did. The very name, The Unnatural World, hints at the darkness encompassed in its post-punk turned drone and noise tinged tracks. And believe me, it is one dark, gloomy album. The lo-fi quality of the recording and screwed production fit well with the darkwave vibe here, gripping the listener with a certain feeling of vast blackness - I like to describe the music here like an unceasing haziness that occasionally turns on the listener to become a crushing oppressive fear of an inevitable future doom. 

On first listen, what first struck me musically was the continuity of the album - I want to say it's elegant, but I'm not sure if such a positive word would fit the arc of this nearly-nauseating collection of songs. The album is not only musically speaking a single sonic piece of writing, but also lyrically it harps on repeated images and themes. From what I can tell, the songs largely deal with death, hopelessness, and tortured souls. Beyond that, there is an implied social critique throughout. Something that any socialist/left-anarchist can dig. In the songs "Burial Society," "Emptiness Will Eat the Witch," and "Guggenheim Wax Museum" there is repeated imagery of digging/soil and impending death. Connect this with the title of "Burial Society" - a song, that this reviewer takes to be set on the top of building whist the narrator considers jumping off (imagery of suicide is repeated throughout the song) - and we get the hint of a social critique: society makes people this way. In "Cropsey," I hear support for this reading.

"Cropsey" opens and ends with narration that sounds like it's straight out of a Godspeed You! Black Emperor song. The narration comes from a documentary about the Pennhurst State School for Children. It's quite unsettling. Again, the implication here is a social critique. I think that the entire song is written from the perspective of a child living there: 

"And I’ve been waiting on everyone

I’ve been waiting on

Cause I’ve been waiting on anyone

To show up and throw me out of here"

You can view the video about the state school here:

Soot is another recurring theme, along with soil, death and earth - suggesting to my ear, along with some imagery of "Burial Society," a sort of mutilated Urbanism like that of Lynch's Eraserhead or Scott's Blade Runner. The message of this album might be summed up thusly - "this place is destroyed and so is our lives, when I look inside myself all is see is a horrible emptiness that I would like nothing more than to negate. We are all doomed." A sort of nihilism that sees no hope. The music fits this theme, save for "Cropsey" and "Music Will Untune the Sky" there are barely any major chords at all. And in "Music Will Untune the Sky" what we receive is a sort of tortured cry for repentance from a God that doesn't exist - hardly something to rejoice about. Moreover, there are hardly any clean guitar tones on the entire LP - with the notable exception of the closer, "Emptiness Will Eat the Witch." Most guitars, bass, synth, anything really is distorted and tortured like the characters that narrate the songs on the album.

Exactly what is causing society to produce the depressed, hopeless, doomed people that populate the narrators in this release is left a mystery - but those of us on the Left need not wonder. What we get with this album is an explosion of the current coordinates of the worst of our society and the darkest possible portrayal of those most completely ran over in the steam-roller that is capitalist production. The last thing that these characters will do is have a nice life, especially in the Urbanism of an unnatural world. 

Essential tracks: "Burial Society," "Cropsey," "Dan and Tim, Reunited by Fate," "Emptiness Will Eat the Witch"

Rating: 9/10