BUSDRIVER – JHELI BEAM
“Conscious rap failed us,” asserts Busdriver at the opening of Jheli Beam, before launching in to a polysyllabic double-time stream-of-consciousness verse – something to do with eyeballs, bylaws and a laser-scan. It’s a set piece that basically defines the lyrical tone of the album (down the rabbit hole!), although there’s enough soulful group-sing and funky vocal syncopation to warrant a Dear Science comparison – Jheli Beam has a similar sonic texture (Handfuls of Sky almost feels like homage), and is, in a similar way, a window on to the id of weird, divided America, circa. 2008. Every verse is a high-octane melange of Busdriver’s left-politics, surreal metaphor, nerdcore – a single strophe on Do The Wop incorporates both American Apparal adds and HTML – and dark takes on mainstream rap. Production-wise, it’s not so far from Anticon, lots of backpack big-beats, synth bloops, strings, and cut up vocal samples, with a few avant-guarde divagations – World Agape is a freestyle over a cut up jazz drum solo, and Scolioscious Jones starts slow and speeds up in the verses, before slowing down again for the chorus, compounding the frantic, paranoid style of Busdriver’s flow. Jheli Beam is a very strange album, sometimes aggressively so – but it’s experimental rap that never drops in energy or intelligence.
***1/2
