Tag Results: the quietus
The Quietus: Relentless Raw Movement: Death Grips Interviewed
Death Grips are the singularly most exciting new thing we have heard in 2011. John Calvert asks Flatlander about their methodology, hip hop, Odd Future, California and mental illness. Image courtesy Death Grips.
Brutal, bodacious, ugly like twisted-metal, obnoxious as a shot-out kneecap, completely barmy. Lightning Bolt are great aren’t they? If only they made hip hop like that. And as if by magic… For a neat description of Death Grips’ ungodly racket you need only take a stroll through MC Ride’s diseased mind, essentially the de facto setting for the West Coasters’ Exmilitary, the most scintillatingly confrontational hip hop album to emerge in years. Between foretelling divine wrath, blatting out nightmarish free associative imagery and remonstrating with nearby squirrels, the interfacial, disembodied MC Ride - a damned soul in a twisted bind - will proffer the odd phrase perfectly in step with the acid bath terror-ride unfolding around him. It might be in the context of eating a dead dog he found behind the house, but there’s something self-reflexive about talk on ‘Guillotine’ of “relentless raw movement” and “hidden art, between and beneath” or “serial number, killing machine…stomp music seriously!” - the later of which more or less nails it. Put’ em all together and you get the idea: murder spelt backwards is MC Ride and if pain be the great educator, it’s back to school with you. Guillotine… Yah!
Bona fide hip hop phenoms, MC Ride, Mexican Girl, Info Warrior, back-room tsar Flatlander and polymath drummer Zach Hill are collectively the masterminds behind what after three months of listening still seems like a freak occurrence in the genre. Exmilitary reboots the very form itself, engineering an unconstructed, wires-exposed killing machine for the despatching of rap’s moneyed dandies, and a constant, indeed relentless source of delight for extreme music fans. The purest affront on cashmoney culture you could conceive of, their incendiary mixtape outguns, outwits and quite simply puts to shame their domesticated counterparts in the trebly heights of chintzy Diamante-rap.
