Amon Tobin, Timbaland disciple! Who would've thought? The last time I paid any attention to this Ninja Tune fixture, he was making music for video games, which seemed like a pretty good reason to stop paying attention. Now he's teamed up with the British drum and bass producer Doubleclick to make a quick little album of apocalyptic slash-and-burn rap futurism, with 1999-vintage Timbo as their spirit animal and an actual one-time Tim protégé on board for a couple of tracks. So yeah, now they've got my attention.
It's going to be impossible to talk about Two Fingers without talking about Tim Mosley, since most of the album's good ideas are good ideas that Tim had years ago: off-kilter stop-start drums, chopped-up shards of Eastern instrumentation, oceans of negative space. And Tobin and Doubleclick can't quite do this stuff as well as Tim once could. But honestly, all that is fine, as Tim isn't really working this style ever since he decided to go full-on cheeseball Euro-dance, and anyway, the armies of post-Tim rap producers are a long, long way away from mining all the gold he put out there between 1997 and 2001. So when the album opens with the eerie clinking drums and backwards otherworldly guitar loop of "Straw Men", it's a weird nostalgic rush, like finding an old sci-fi pulp novel and marveling about how its visions of the future were so much cooler than how the future actually turned out. It helps that the British rapper Sway, who guests on this song and plenty more, absolutely murders the thing, never saying much or leaving much of a personality imprint but showing absolute mastery of a very particular breakneck technical style, one that works great for complimenting the oozing atmosphere around him.
Sway guests on seven of the album's tracks, and his participation is a mixed blessing. He was never a grime rapper, whatever that meant, and his staunch devotion to technical dexterity always stood in stark contrast to that scene's screaming chaos. Here, he sounds best talking blasted-earth Armageddon, like when he talks about the time he met some Brazilian gang types on "What You Know": "The difference between them Gs and we/ Is they fighting for peace while we fight for a piece." He seethes beautifully. But on an album that aims for dark cohesion as much as this one, I can't fathom why he'd devote two songs to relationship-rap or another, "Jewels and Gems", to sub-Canibus bits of forehead-slapping wisdom. For instance: "You can't describe pictures without the words." (This is his reason for believing that a picture is not, in fact, worth a thousand words.) Or: "There's no evil in money; the evil's in the greed." Don't think too hard there, buddy.
Former Timbaland mainstay Ms. Jade, who released a couple of great singles and a pretty good album in 2002 before disappearing completely, shows up for a couple of tracks, and it's great to hear that she can still wreck a track, even if she is saddled with substandard hooks. Dancehall siren Ce'cile also drops in for a track, her effortless, breezy cool nicely offsetting the heaviness erupting all around her. But Two Fingers really works best when it fades into a vaguely forbidding background throb. Sway, after all, is the sort of rapper who sounds best when you're not paying all that much attention to him, and there's a nice overhanging ominousness throughout the album. The brisk 40-minute run time keeps things from getting too oppressive or monochromatic. The tracks keep subtly shifting throughout, just enough to keep you interested without overwhelming you. Every once in a while, Tobin and Doubleclick pull out a great little trick like the moment on "High Life" where they distort Sway's voice so severely that it actually dissolves into clicks and beeps. The whole record is a smart little left-turn for everyone involved. And if it's not quite an unalloyed triumph, I would totally play a video game with this soundtrack.
