The Anticon stamp is a fine argument for why labels can still matter in these oh-so-very-modern days of instantaneous identity and product delivery dot com forward slash. It’s a guarantee. It tells you ‘it’s ok, there will be something, maybe many things, that will make you stop for breath on this record’. Imagine that, eh. Creativity is taken for granted and not demanded nearly often enough, and here’s a label that kicks that into touch a little. It’s a hip-hop label, if you like, but that is really just a convenient way of tagging it. Which, surprisingly, makes this record’s defining characteristic how very ordinary it is. It’s not mainstream-ordinary exactly, but it is quite straight forward. But then everything’s relative.
Why? is one third of apparently defunct and ridiculously innovative Anticon trio cLOUDDED, along with Doseone and Odd Nosdam, and for this particular record has moved away from the more frenzied styles of earlier work and assembled a fully functioning band to work conventionally around him. Signs of his old collective remain, but artfully out of focus, twisting the music’s ankle when you’re looking the other way. Occasionally there are echoes of cLOUDDED’s claustrophobic booby-trap vocal stylings, like the chorus/2nd verse/whatever of ‘Gemini (Birthday Song)’ and the surging, almost a capella, razor peaks of ‘Waterfalls’, but by and large these are songs to be played on the radio.
Consulting the universal pop music spectrum wall chart, this time everything works out closer to Eels than it does E=mc2. It’s pop with a pulse and an IQ that can keep up with it. Opening track ‘Crushed Bones’ is dusky folk with tribal, millennial percussion that teeters on the edge of a precipice, taking in Cash, Beefheart and Buck 65 and sitting them around a campfire with marshmallows. ‘Yo Yo Bye Bye’ drags Ben Folds before a telescope and shows him the size of everything, and ‘Sanddollars’ moves into Death Cab For Cutie’s neighbourhood and must surely only be one neurotic teenage breakdown from guesting on the OC. The bulky difference is that the storytelling, the extreme rhymes, the durable imagination here probably trumps all of those. And that’s an achievement to match the innovation that he’s let go of.