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I'm already nervous and giddy with anticipation. El-P seems to be back up and running as an artist in his own right rather than a producer, guest MC and label owner for other people. His Myspace blog tells us he's in the closing stages of making the album, and he's started a blog to diarise the final phase of his creative process.
Now that blog is interesting, specifically because of the following list of guest artists and the manner in which El seems to be using them:
Tunde Adebimpe
tame 1
mr lif
aesop rock
trent reznor
the mars volta
matt sweeny
james mcnew
rob sonic
im not a big fan of records that have a bunch of (featuring so and so) after every song title. my collaborations for the most part come from friendships i have with people who happen to be in the vicinity while im making my shit. little splashes of other peoples voices, talents, energy used in subtle ways is the way i usually like to freak it. rob does some back ups, sweeny plays some guitar, aes drops a verse, james plays some bass... whatever works at the time. its the southpark theory: when george clooney appeared on southpark it was as a gay dog. thats the type of shit that makes my day.
Purely from a Seth-taste angle that list has me more than a little cautious. The last thing I want is an Uncle-style abortion of a record, but thankfully that doesn't seem to be what El wants either.
Seeing Trent Reznor and The Mars Volta's names on anything would usually be enough to make me run a mile. Reznor is one of the main influencers behind a certain way of grafting chunks of dance onto rock music in a manner that I find almost totally bereft of insight into what makes dance and electronic music tick. Musically the guy's a hamfisted hack who may as well have dreamed up his sound in the marketing lab next door to Limp Bizkit's skin-crawling hip hop appropriation experiments. The Mars Volta are a bleeding wounded little animal after the traumatic operation that separated out the two halves of At The Drive-In, lacking the restraint and gut-punch focus that the members of Sparta added to the mix that made Relationship of Command such a brilliant, brilliant record. Given that these artists make my skin crawl I'm not relishing the reviews and the pre-publicity for this record which will invariably focus on the names that the press know.
But I trust El-P himself, whatever my creeping sense of dread concerning hip hop featuring live musicians might tell me. I almost cried the first time I head Fantastic Damage, one of the most perfect albums in my collection. He's the only real survivor of the independent hip hop surge of the Nineties, the only one who had it in him to go world class and put out more than just a few great singles.
So what are people's expectations? Heard anything more than Everything Must Go? |
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