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 74: Dabrye – Two/Three

A lot of hip-hop lacks sorely in musicality where the beats are concerned. It’s a genre with conflicting goals: it’s a form based around lyricism, at this point, but it got its start from MCs working a crowd up over a crate full of looping soul records. The MC was working in service of the beats, trying to make sure people were having a good time. Over time, the words took over, and hip-hop is certainly better for it. But where does that leave the producer? The DJ? The talented artist behind the boards who gives those rappers’ words legs so’s they can get to stepping?

A producer wants to put out a record of his music, he needs people to rap over it. Sure, some can get away with discs of instrumentals, but who is that for? Someone on the level of J Dilla can (posthumously) put out an album of 45-second snippets of beats and tunes made for people, and you can play “Oh, I recognize that beat, that’s from that Ghostface song” — cool. But it’s still that Ghostface song. Any of the most intense, musical hip-hop I’ve ever heard (Cannibal Ox’s Cold Vein for example) is most memorable for the words, even when the production is something from another world and would be entertaining enough on its own.

Why is that? Rappers and producers need each other. Neither can succeed without the other. Look at Kanye — where would he be without H to the Izzo? Even when he had a book full of good rhymes, he was laughed away from a microphone time and time again by people who would benefit from him being on the decks.

Where does this leave the creatively restless producer who isn’t inclined towards doing dance-hall music like house, techno — or whatever sub-genre thereof is hot at the moment — and who doesn’t want to rap? There are the oddballs like El-P who can rap just well enough to put out great albums on their own, but are really much better off at the computer (producing stuff like Cold Vein). One could go the Dr. Dre route and get rich enough to hire people like Jay-Z to write your rhymes. Or one could just put out crazy, cerebral, progressive electronic tracks and make friends with the rappers who smoke the most pot.

That appears to be Dabrye’s strategy. Dabrye is one of the many noms de plume of Detroit-based producer Tadd Mullinix (sic). Mullinix’s first couple of releases were (apparently) IDM, glitchy narcotized dance music, and I guess then he turned on to the idea of producing for rap music. On this disc, he goes for every boundary possible, musically: the whole thing is turgid with sound, frequently finding seven copies of the same hi-hat rattling around over a sharp saw-wave synth or twelve. The prevailing mood is not as sinister as most maximalist electro producers (the aforementioned El-P) but rather more positive, more confrontational than foreboding, and ever danceable.

The only problem comes in the rappers involved. Most of them just aren’t that good, and the production fights them constantly. Most of the mealy-mouthed rappers get lost in the mess of sound and can’t beat it. It’s easy to get the impression that the rappers are taking a backseat to the producer, which maybe they are. It is his album, sure. But it just ends up sounding messy. And it doesn’t have to be that way. On the strongest track — “Game Over” — you get really good verses by Jay Dilla and Phat Kat, and the production doesn’t try to talk over them. It’s possibly his best beat, with a bum leg limp to the rhythm, and the choruses are the clinchers. In the choruses he lays this droning organ note behind them that sounds way too loud, like it is trying to drown them out, but it’s stuffed off to the side, and doesn’t change or attract attention, really, so it actually just highlights the lyricists brilliantly, making their words sound much more powerful when they’re not actually saying all that much. It’s on that track that Dabrye shows he knows what he’s doing, and it’s unfortunate that he doesn’t carry that tendency over the rest of the album.

Sure, it’s all mostly pretty entertaining, and the instrumental tracks are killer, too. Likewise, the other vocal tracks aren’t all that bad, it’s just that you have to tune out the rappers to enjoy them properly. Dabrye needs to make a decision: Whether he wants people to be listening to him, or listening to the rappers. He tries to have both far more often than he should.