If there’s an animating principle that runs through all of clipping.’s work to date, it’s a willingness to challenge expectations at every turn. To recap, in the past, the L.A. rap trio have swapped out low-end—a traditional pillar of hip-hop’s sound—for high-pitched noise. They once created a drum track entirely from recordings of gunshots. They’ve forced themselves to jump through conceptual hoops—their previous full-length completely eschewed use of the pronoun “I.” And they’ve built a rap song around a power electronics sample from Whitehouse. All of this headiness makes a bit more sense when you consider the band members’ recent outside pursuits: William Hutson finished a Ph.D. dissertation on experimental music, Jonathan Snipes composed film scores, and Daveed Diggs won both a Grammy and a Tony for his performance in the runaway hit musical, Hamilton.
clipping.’s latest full-length, Splendor & Misery, might just be their most challenging release yet. It’s a hip-hop space opera of sorts, one that, according to the band, “follows the sole survivor of a slave uprising on an interstellar cargo ship, and the onboard computer that falls in love with him.” Calling the album high-concept feels like an understatement. This is the rare rap release that draws inspiration in equal parts from prog-rock and P-funk.
Certainly, it’s difficult to question the quality of the raw materials used here. Founding members Snipes and Hutson skillfully evoke the hum of the ship’s machinery with their bleeps, bloops, and shuddering waves of static. Though it should come as no surprise, Diggs’ rapping is technically impressive, if a bit clinical, throughout Splendor & Misery. On “The Breach,” for example, the rapper dexterously spits tongue-twisting lines for 40 straight seconds. His rapid-fire delivery brings to mind Busdriver and André 3000.
Splendor & Misery’s best songs manage to succeed on their own terms, independent of the overarching narrative. “All Black” sets up the storyline in third-person: “So the danger, clear and present/Is presented as the gift of freedom/Wrapped in days of rapping to himself/Up until his vocal chords collapse.” It nods toward the familiar with turns of phrase (the “all black everything” vacuum of space) and playful anachronisms. “Air ’Em Out” is a trap anthem in zero-gravity, its gleaming synths and skittering drums floating skyward with no bassline to hold them down. Diggs allows his tightly-wound delivery to go slack here, imbuing the track with a looseness and personality that’s sorely missing from much of the album.
As with much of clipping.’s work, the ambition is admirable: using a rap album for an Afrofuturist take on 2001: A Space Odyssey. Unfortunately, most of Splendor & Misery’s songs rely on the narrative to propel them forward, not the other way around. Many of these tracks lack an identifiable rhythm section and feel more like spoken-word. It’s possible to create compelling hip-hop instrumentals from shards of noise—just look at Food for Animals and Death Grips or clipping.’s previous work—but on Splendor & Misery, clipping. often prize well-placed sound effects over songcraft. In its drive for conceptual rigor, the album neglects to engage the listener musically. That puts a lot of weight on the story, which tends toward the abstract. Perhaps Splendor & Misery’s plot would be better-suited to another medium—the hip-hop musical is, after all, enjoying something of a moment on Broadway.
