On Cadence Weapon's pair of 2005 releases, the mixtape Cadence Weapon Is the Black Hand and the album Breaking Kayfabe, it was thrilling to watch (former Pitchfork writer) Rollie Pemberton assemble his hip-hop bricolage in plain view. The sparse Canadian rap canon afforded him plenty of room to maneuver, and he used it to execute acrobatic feats of self-invention. As the son of Teddy Pemberton, the radio DJ for the seminal Canadian hip-hop program "The Black Experience in Sound", the junior Pemberton must have been acutely aware of his tacit responsibility not just to make hip-hop, but to create a strain of it from the ground up.
Aggressive mechanical drum patterns, gnarly electro synths, oddball samples, rubbery vocal cadences, pop-cultural punch lines, honor-roll puns: All of these comprised the broad strokes of Pemberton's musical identity, and now, on Afterparty Babies, they feel like the fixed elements of a mature style. But at the time, hedged in by leftfield excursions, they felt tenuous, as if Pemberton were testing a variety of directions before choosing one. Skewed instrumentals like "Those Sliders", hallucinatory mash-ups like "The Anthem (Cadence Weapon National Remix)", and bizarre Reichian beats like the one on "Fathom" made Pemberton's style sound marvelously curious and questing.
If the satisfying Afterparty Babies doesn't have the same thunderclap impact of its predecessors, it's because that element of adventure is subdued. This record has a clearer idea of what it wants to be, with seams neatly tucked away under a monolithic style. Pemberton's knack for massaging startling sounds into hyperkinetic dance tracks flares up periodically: "Do I Miss My Friends?" is built upon a Hanson-baiting a capella "mmm-bop." More often, he sticks to a reliable blend of techno and vintage electro. But if Afterparty Babies solidifies the musical nature of the Cadence Weapon project, Pemberton's identity seems as fluid and unresolved as ever
Pemberton himself is not quite a hipster rapper, although he does have lots to say about Friendster, emoticons, and Heiro-logo tattoos. He's not quite a nerd rapper, although he does drizzle juicy 8-bit blips and molten, neon synths over "Limited Edition of OJ Slammer" while rapping about Tom Cruise and Katie Holmes. He's not quite an undie messiah, although he takes a few potshots at what he perceives as a vacuous mainstream, especially on the stabby neo-disco track "Real Estate", where "rappers on the radio don't talk about shit" and choruses are fast-food jingles. He's not quite an old-skool preservationist, although Afterparty Babies is awash in scratching and sturdily linear sample beds, and he's not quite a party-and-bullshit MC, although he's fond of house beats and clubland send-ups like "Unsuccessful Club Nights". Instead, Cadence Weapon is a panoramic, everything-but-the-gangster portrait of modern hip-hop offshoots.
"The New Face of Fashion", a nasty electro banger with funk accents, is a screed against trendy couture. On the album's back cover, Pemberton appears in a red hoodie and a peppermint-striped tee with abstract lightning bolt patterns. "Limited Edition OJ Slammer", a diatribe against celebrity-obsession that finds Pemberton "wiping the fame off [his] mouth," seems rather ironic on a record characterized by lyrics like "Say you spray the nina when you're fey like Tina" (on "Your Hair's Not Clothes!", amid fluttering bat-wing synths and deep tone umlauts). At their core, most of the songs here are critiques of the same fast, slick youth culture in which Pemberton is an avid participant, and this paradox is what gives Afterparty Babies its self-contradicting aura. The cover sums it up: In a yearbook-style photo, Pemberton sits on a stool in front of a gallery of standard-issue indie-hipsters (and one Kid Rock clone), included yet apart.
This sort of self-contradiction is really just honesty. Internally consistent points of view are rare, and Pemberton makes no attempt to construct a false one. A thin seam of personal archaeology lends another layer of biographical complexity to the statements and contexts that negate each other. "Do I Miss My Friends?" is dedicated to "all the accidents out there;" the afterparty babies for which the record is titled. A skit at the end of "In Search of the Youth Crew" finds a relative reminiscing about young Rollie's desires to play with dolls. When Pemberton says, "Allegory I label a true story," he's talking about girls again. But he's also talking about Afterparty Babies, which finds him attempting to reconcile his beliefs, lifestyle, and origins, yet finding no place where they neatly align.
