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“I know you’re enthusiastic about the new Food For Animals disc, but you’re shaking the entire house.” This response from a housemate is the kind of thing one can expect within seconds of popping in Scavengers, because as soon as the schizoid beats that tenuously construct “Oh Oh Oh”’s insane 29 seconds of wide-open spaces and noisy buildup, you’ll be figuring out ways to get your stereo cranked up way past 11. Chunks of drywall will be dropping off the ceiling as DJ Ricky Rabbit squelches a barrage of raw, seemingly untamable noise and ear splitting treble into the first beat of “Elephants,” with R&B samples forcibly ground into the mix like someone took an early Wu-Tang release and ran it through an exploding toaster, one that’s hopping around and spitting flames like it’s full of psycho-reactive slime a la Ghostbuster 2. It’s been said that Food For Animals “aren’t your parents’ hip-hop.” My parents were never much for hip-hop, as it were, but Food For Animals is certainly an animal apart from anything that might comfortably fit into that genre, and it’d even be an injustice to try to squeeze it into the confines of that extra-cerebral cousin of a genre, “glitch-hop.” Electro? No, that certainly won’t work, nor will “IDM,” nor “noise,” nor any other umbrella electronic label you’d try to throw at it. From the birthplace of early American hardcore, FFA take the attitude of the earliest Dischord releases–Teen Idles and Minor Threat onward—and squeezes it into every blistering, distorted “beat” that blares out of Scavengers. This is music that, for all its innovation, is replete with enough unbridled aggression that maybe the best way to describe it is with emphatic expletives and exclamation points, but I won’t take the easy way out. MC Vulture Voltaire’s restrained rapping kicks in on “Elephants,” in the immediate aftermath of an R&B sample warped all to hell, and at about a minute in he’s telling you he’ll make you “bust a mean Jackson Pollock in your drawers.” Too late, though, as the combo of Rick Rab’s (as the moniker is lovingly abbreviated) aural onslaught and Vulture’s controlled aggression has already got you laying an egg (with no time to make it to the Marcel Duchamp you have hanging on your wall, let alone the bathroom.) Having conquered the gap between abstract expressionism and beat-induced bowel movements, things then flow seamlessly into the hammering breakbeats of the ominous “Brand New,” political sentiment flying around in no uncertain terms, with MCVV sounding notably angrier than before, explaining presumably to all the old folks who have yet to keel over up to this point, “I fucked up your ticker with a ‘Fuck Bush’ sticker.” So for all the “Voltaire” talking art and philosophy, there’s the “Vulture,” vultures of course being emblematic of all that is big, mean and scary. And so a pattern emerges, albeit a non-formulaic one, with every manner of trebly glitch, blare and blast showing up to ruin your ears before one of them ends up bursting unexpectedly into the foundation over which Mr. Voltaire gets pissed off. So
you may have hypothesized by this point that I know as much about
hip-hop as your average post-college, post-punk, post-modernist
poster child, and don’t think that I haven’t had moments
where I’ve tried to describe how Vulture raps with such a
paradoxically laid-back destructiveness, and the closest I’ve
been able to come up with is, “well, I guess maybe it’s
a bit like Alan Vega…” No, I’m not certain that’s
quite the best comparison to draw, but I’m quite certain that
Scavengers is a disc that doesn’t require a huge vocabulary
of rap knowledge to appreciate. “Post-hardcore” not
in the strict musical sense, but in the most literal sense, Scavengers
is so blistering in its delivery, so cripplingly noisy but unabashedly
appealing, one is easily apt to forget how artsy and profoundly
punk the whole idea of it is. |
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BOOKS Stefan Fatsis The author of Word Freak on Scrabble fanatics and becoming one of them, by Davy Rothbart Reviews MOVIES MUSIC MUSIC
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