Anticon is usually addressed as an experimental hip-hop label, but this is misleading. The experiment has been completed for some time, and now the various members of the collective announce its findings over and over. This isn't necessarily a censure; it simply means that the label has developed an aesthetic-- a blend of hip-hop, post-rock, sound collage, and electro-pop-- that cuts across nearly all of its recent releases. This is a natural outcome of the Anticon's intricately collaborative nature-- any given release by Sole, Doseone, Pedestrian, Odd Nosdam, Alias, or Why? will probably feature cameos from all the rest. The imprint has traded the element of surprise for familiarity, which is bad news for listeners who place a high premium on novelty, good for those who enjoy the established Anticon idiom.
Like everyone in Anticon, Jel has been involved in many in-house collaborations (most notably Themselves, Subtle, and 13 & God), and his debut LP-- a murky palimpsest of disembodied samples and dirty beats, incantatory rhymes and live instrumentation, leftist rhetoric and absurdist non sequiturs, breathy female vocals and ephemeral melodies-- features the usual array of cameos from Anticon and like-minded artists. In other words, it's another archetypal Anticon record. Why? plays a twinkling piano and eerily whistling synth to Jel's intricately sculpted martial percussion and string instrument accents on "All Day Breakfast". The sluggish, grimy funk of "Soft Money, Dry Bones" finds Jel running a Pedestrian-penned digest of leftist surrealism ("Dry bones recruited outside of a mall for 'Real World: Kabul'") through his serviceable yet anonymous backpacker flow. Stefanie Bohm of Ms. John Soda adds her abstracted coo to this and to the blippy static of "All Around", and Odd Nosdam laces colorful drones through the coruscating twitter of "Know You Don't".
The first Themselves record, Them, remains the pinnacle of the more rap-oriented side of Anticon's catalog, in no small part because of how perfectly Jel's minimalist beatscape complemented Doseone's maximalist flow. Unfortunately, Soft Money doesn't compare favorably to that visionary work-- its pleasures are more obvious and middle-of-the-road. Having abandoned razor-sharp minimalism for a murkier, fuller tone, Jel's music here doesn't focus your attention to a laser-point the way Them did, but neither is it big enough to saturate it-- it lurks comfortably in the middle distance. Its politics, too, are overstated yet affectless: Instead of showing, Jel tells, with undie-rap's typically preachy bent. The anti-auto-industry screed "To Buy a Car" cuts up commercials over a slinky buzz and echoing pings, and the message is far from subtle: "Don't buy this product; you don't need it." The same might be said of Soft Money-- as it doesn't deviate from the standard palette, those of you with a lot of mostly-instrumental hip-hop in your collection don't in fact need it. But it's a solid example of the form, and so you might want it-- not a good enough justification for buying an environment-raping Hummer, maybe, but good enough for a record.
