So as you may recall from last week’s edition, one of my vows was to listen to more new music. I actually followed up on my own resolution immediately and listened to two new releases last week pretty intensively. As I mentioned, I was pretty bummed at the lack of new music that I listened to in 2014. Even in our 2014 Year in Review episode of 9ES we all had pretty slim pickings for new music. So I started off 2015 by listening to brand new music. How new? Both releases I checked came out in the first week of January, that’s right, these came out in the past 12 days. I listened to Understudy EP by Låpsley and the surprise instrumental album Fashion Week by Death Grips.
So Death Grips were always on the periphery for me. They’ve always been that noisey, industrial hip-hop act where a crazy man screams raps at me that I couldn’t really understand since the music was so loud and he was so screamy. That being said I always kind of dug them. If the sentence “noisey industrial hip-hop act where a crazy man screams raps” seems interesting to you, you will also probably dig them. They are basically that sentence in the best way possible. If anything about that sentence is off putting to you, maybe take a pass on most of their work. However, if the only part of that sentence that is off putting is “a crazy man screams raps” then maybe Fashion Week is for you. Why? Because it is instrumental. Now, I don’t know if that means that it’s the work of just Andy Morin (programming) and Zach Hill (drums) or if MC Ride has stepped in to some production role on this disk, but there are no classic Death Grips vocals anywhere on this disk.
I quite like it. The production quality is all over the place and there’s not a whole lot of polish anywhere to be found on the noisey drums and dark beats being hammered out in Fashion Week. That’s probably a pretty distinct choice though since I think the band is best known for it’s raw sound and performances, an over produced “clean” work would be out of place.
Then there’s the confusing matter of how this record even happened in the first place. ↓ Read the rest of this entry…
