As much as any other MC and producer in hip-hop, Beans is an auteur. With Anti-Pop Consortium and across a series of solo records, Beans has honed a signature futurist style typified by intricate fast-talking raps and steely, minimal beats. And while he often raps about the same subject matters as the multi-platinum artists-- his exquisite and expensive taste in apparel, his prowess both on the mic and between the sheets-- he does so in ways that are consistently disorienting and inventive. If Anti-Pop's mission was a deconstruction of hip-hop, Beans has been an ever faithful zealot.
A flipside of autership can too often be hermeticism, but although Beans' solo albums have been largely self-produced, he has never shied away from collaborations. His 2006 album Only saw him recording with a pair of jazz instrumentalists, and he's previously worked with producers ranging from Alec Empire to DJ Shadow. His latest album, and first on boundary testing label anticon., End It All, enlists producers as omnivorous as Four Tet and Tobacco and as disparate as disco pushers In Flagranti and Interpol drummer Sam Fogarino. What's remarkable about End It All, though, isn't its variety but its laser focus-- Beans seems to bend all his collaborators to his singular vision: heavy percussion, deep bass, the sparest of melodic elements, and echoing, nerve-rattling synthesizer effects. It's an ominous sound, and it suits his rapid-fire, anxious-making raps well.
The album opens with its glossiest track, the Ade Firth-produced "Superstar Destroyer", on which Beans offers tongue-twisted boasts over synth flutter and gauzy, upward-wavering chords. "Deathsweater" is a funk track whose choruses are as dedicated to clotheshorse collar-popping as its verses are to racing down tangential rabbit holes. On "Gluetraps", Four Tet recycles the sort of soft electric piano tones and off-kilter synth chirps heard on his last album, while on "Anvil Falling" he lays an unexpectedly harsh, squelching lead over headlong rhythm; both are brief interludes on which Beans relentlessly hammers away at single free-associative verses. Tobacco gets typically skuzzy and analogue on "Glass Coffins", burying a loping bassline and 8-bit arpeggios under a wash of buzzsaw noise. In Flagranti allow a little of their dark Italo vibe to bubble up in the form of a motorik bassline underneath the sharp snare and lone noisy sample of "Air Is Free", while Beans orates in a displaced Run-D.M.C. style-- the combination is, as he says, "retro in the sense that it's good," but still decidedly modern.
"Mellow You Out" is by far the most distinctive track here, largely due to the album's only guest vocalist, Tunde Adebimpe of TV on the Radio, whose unmistakable wail and falsetto lend the song a touch of human soulfulness otherwise absent in Beans' icy cold aggression. Another odd moment occurs on "Hardliner", when the no-holds-barred MC engages in a bit of self-censorship, bleeping an obvious Cadence Weapon dis amidst telltale mentions of Busy P, TTC, and a shared bill at the Knitting Factory.
If Beans' consistency is what holds this album's diverse line-up together, it can also be his occasional pitfall as an MC, as his own cadence can sometimes lock into a predictable sing-song rise and fall, every other syllable a hard accent, to the point that the yo-yoing begins to detract from the dazzling flow. Ultimately, though, End It All, is another well-earned notch in Beans' solo belt and a testament to the strength of his artistic vision-- anyone who can get a convincing hip-hop beat out of Interpol surely deserves some kind of ambassadorship.
