I've made enough ill-advised purchases to recognize that it's common practice for artists to release instrumental hip-hop albums, stripping away the vocals and selling rappers' souls to throngs of incompetent DJs. That's why the new Daedelus album is a little perplexing: It's a "rethinking" of this year's The Weather, an album that found Busdriver and Radioinactive unleashing arrhythmic non-sequiturs and product placement over Daedelus' harp-filling, beat-killing wingtip hip-hop. The first sound on the new album is a sample: "We broke up because there were intergroup pressures and it was an experiment" (okay, it was on the original album, too, but still-- the first thing you hear?!). We should probably take this with a grain of salt, as Daedelus is more a sardonic Santa Monica loafer than a 50 Cent, but we can probably safely assume someone's a little bitter.
To ignore this possibly fictional animosity for a moment, The Weather's beats were actually pretty inspired, especially given that Daedelus was an IDM artist sampling ultra-vintage 78s for the Plug Research label long before he ever attempted a project like this one. In retrospect, though, The Weather seems a cage, wherein a dejected Daedelus was enslaved in order to prevent overshadowing the vocalists. "Rethinking" is when a loophole in the hip-hop bureaucracy accidentally let loose a lunatic whose only munitions are his attention deficit disorder and a vast reservoir of every type of pop music since 1920.
I have neither the patience nor intelligence to compare every new version of The Weather with the Rethinking version. Suffice to say, the "rethinks" are basically little more than extravagant versions of the old ones (which means on the remix album, there's great music and starving tedium in roughly equal proportions). The music consists of little kids' playground games, 60s saccharine pop, and those harp-and-strings passages that always mean Jimmy Stewart's about to have yet another bad dream. "Chorus, Verse, Chorus" is a full Japanese torch song protected by the sort of blaxploitation sword-funk that RZA would be proud of. "Dark Days" is a 60s girl band interspersed with the kind of silly jams those kids from Peanuts would always stumble around to. These kinds of songs are simultaneously bizarre, obscene, and pretty damn stupid, together forming my definition of "mildly amusing." But sometimes the formula lunges into "masterpiece" status: the classic "Greatly Exaggerated, Our Demise" layers reggae, James Brown-style yelps, children's jump-rope rhymes, and 50s easy listening, ending up somewhere between a Jamaican prison's carousel and the appliance section at Sears.
While even this kind of music is a little grittier than Daedelus' 2002 solo release Invention, if not as complex, elsewhere Daedelus vigorously fights the power like a homeless Def Jux producer. Hip-hop doesn't get much more abrasive than "Missing", which is about as dirty as shuffling across a freeway wearing nothing but soup cans. Unfortunately, on more traditional hip-hop tracks, like "Robotic Girls Are Hard", everything is tempered by his patented toy pianos and orchestration-- and by the time it rolls around, it no long seems either innovative or particularly affecting.
Occasionally, the musical jokes don't exactly pay off: "Name Game"'s potion of mentally challenged children samples and dense, claustrophobic rhythm ain't exactly gonna frighten DJ Shadow's "The Number Song". This is an exception, though. Usually the jokes are actually more entertaining than the music they produce. "Bright Stars" commences with a paralyzing rocket launch and all manner of crazy sci-fi samples until the whole track gets whisked away into whistling, charming exotica, far more appropriate for your grandfather's shuffleboard club than a psychedelic journey into the cosmos. Conversely, in "Hardly Hip-Hop", a middle-class family encounters an unexpected dinner guest who just happens to be a gale of shattering static in a French police state. Monty Python didn't even take the joke that far.
There isn't really much of a comparison between this and The Weather; one is intended as a sort of supplement to the rappers (maybe a complement in the perfect rapocracy), while the other has nothing to rely on but itself. At the same time, there's enough overlap that you should probably pick one or the other. Basically it comes down to which you like more: lyrics or rule-breaking polyphony.
