Day 79: Blue Sky Black Death – Heap of Broken Images

Not knowing anything about an artist before you listen to one of their album can lead to surprises. A double-disc could turn out to be two totally different things, things that would easily be separable into two releases. Blue Sky Black Death appear at first to be a trip-hop/hip-hop instrumental act. Within moments of the first track, BSBD’s have laid out the scope of their vision in scratches and scrapes: as the title says, “Skies Open” — clouds part, and a sarcastic sun shines on a desolate, abandoned world. A deep, consuming beat pulls you in, and instruments meander around. But it’s not long until the song goes from backdrop to foreground, as detail accumulates and haunted, ethereal sounds start to coalesce into something alive and foreboding. Before the first track is even open a world has died, and the spirits of its former inhabitants have clawed their way up the dirt inclines of hastily-dug mass graves.

That’s just the first track.

The album has a palpable energy and humanity, which actually brilliantly solves the problem with most instrumental hip-hop feeling like there should be rapping over top of it. The songs are abuzz with samples, be they snatches of dialog from movies, random shouts and screams ripped from some unwitnessed mania, or simply snarky machines spitting out noise. I’d recommend listening to “Heroin for God” for an example of the breadth of their sound. You have a propulsive beat with a trunk-bursting bassline, the odd 808 cowbell accentuating where it wants to, disjointed ranting fraying into noise, live instruments and symphonic samples intermingling. The result is something you can bob your head to, yet something that has enough movement to lay back and sink into. It’s a difficult balance to strike, but they do it and make it sound easy.

Then disc 2.

On disc 2, they subvert their experimental style and do several tracks with some lesser-known rappers, most of whom are probably lesser-known for a reason: A lot of them aren’t very good. None of them are appallingly bad, except they are almost all annoyingly verbose. The real problem is one I ran into with the Dabyre album last week-ish, which is that random raps just don’t work over beats like this. Head-case producers like El-P make it work by getting people to rap over the beats who can paint as dystopic and miserable a lyrical world as his beats do. They align. The rap tracks on this album are all (cleverly worded, often) generic boast tracks that don’t say anything engaging or convincing. It’s gang banging with a thesaurus rather than a gat. It’s weak.

The beats on the rap half remain foreboding and epic, but they pare the tracks down to the background, which is the right thing to do. It’s awful to hear a producer trying to buck the vocalist off. But in this case, the tracks outclass the rappers anyway, and do it while feeling half-hearted and punch-pulled. The rap half of the album isn’t bad, per se, and even has a few tracks that work extremely well (“Street Legends“), but as a whole it just doesn’t have much to offer, and especially fails to impress next to its more convincing twin disc. Stick to the first half of this album, and you have a classic on your hands.

Day 64: This Heat – Deceit

At first listen, this album suggests how you might best take it in, opening with “Sleep” lulling you with druidic chants quietly insisting you “Sleep sleep sleep/go to sleep.” From there, This Heat bring on night terrors with the hallucinating-ants-wriggling-out-of-your-pores trip of “Paper Hats“. This track takes the musical antagonism of King Crimson and applies it deftly to creating as moody and unwelcoming a soundscape as possible: guitar arpeggios flutter mechanically, a drum set tries to wrestle the song to the ground, and a synthesizer in the next room malfunctions. Things go nowhere, the track chasing its own tail, until the microphone develops sentience and crawls slowly out of the studio.

“S.P.Q.R.” is the song where the ‘Post-punk’ label that This Heat garner so frequently in my reading begins to crystalize. In this song Joy Division-esque guitars collide with martial drums and disaffected gang vocals, resulting in a quiet thrash that curls up fetally at the foot of an unfathomable aggression, ready at any moment to send limbs flailing about.

This brink of furor, this chin-buried-in-chest tension ends up being the album’s strongest quality. Things continue with “Cenotaph“, which breathes more easily but doesn’t feel any better, and then, in a dream-logic series of free associations, comes the brilliant bonfire dance of “Shrink Wrap” and the studio-effect tinkering of “Radio Prague”. But the earlier nightmare recurs, and “Makeshift Swahili” takes all the unease that’s been percolating in the air in the studio and finally turns it on you, and the effect is disturbing. From there, the sound of the album culminates in its final three tracks, which take all the fear and resentment that preceded and bring them finally to a climax, rewarding any who made it that far without being driven away.

Deceit exemplifies the punk spirit even if you couldn’t possibly imagine them having mohawks or any traditional ‘punk’ signifiers. They channel the worst alienation into a musical package that bucks any normalizing structure, in the process making something that sounds (even now) original and spits in the face of conventionality, while at the same time creating something rather than merely demeaning or destroying. For those who can identify, there is comfort here. The sometimes-antagonistic song structures, the abrasive tonality, are not there to keep you out, they’re there to keep everyone but you out.