Bassnectar is the brainchild of String Cheese Incident opener and Burning Man fixture Lorin Ashton, who claims to be more of a metalhead than a hippie but comes across in interviews like the type of guy who got into music as a means of changing the whole entire world and denotes his anti-establishment philosophy with phrases like "Mainstream Culture is the dildo of choice for the apathetic." If Underground Communication is any indication, his preferred method for fighting the system and tearing down the artificial plastic robot assembly-line spoon-fed plugged-into-the-Matrix horrors of mainstream commercial radio pop is to sound about 10 years out of date. The record comes across like the end result of that weird period in the late 90s when boutique labels and 2 a.m. MTV programs tried to cram disparate genres of electronic music into the same slot and maybe use the resulting ill-defined generic digital gunk to remix Redman or something. The overall sound feels like a mixture of jungle with all the bass but none of the ferocity or unpredictability, big beat with all the obviousness and none of the fun, gabber's punchiness drained of velocity and rage, and a largely funkless simulation of hip-hop that couldn't recognize the Apache break after 16 bars.
Most of the parts don't fit because they seem largely secondary to Ashton's main musical fetish, which consists of bass drops and plenty of'‘em. They're almost uniformly identical-sounding-- a guttural series of blorps and blurps that sound like the low-end from Roots Manuva's "Witness (1 Hope)" forced to ceaselessly toil in Bassnectar's underground beat mines. And while he sometimes changes up the gimmickry (a Shakey's Pizza honky-tonk piano in "Carried Away"; new age tinkle-synths in "Impossible and Overwhelming"), practically the entire first half of the album and most of the second rides on an overwhelmingly repetitive approach to laying down actual beats. The drum programming beneath all that bass tends to sound undeveloped and perfunctory, using the same stock sounds and superficially switching them up just enough that it doesn't feel like listening to the hippie-rave equivalent of a Wesley Willis album.
As an instrumental record, Underground Communication would merely be a dull, half-remembered rehash of breaktronica circa 1999, but it's a "rap" record, albeit one where the most famous participant comes from ego trip's The (White) Rapper Show. Persia does attempt to hold it down for two tracks-- the irritating pseudo-glitch of "Bomb the Blocks" and the flatulent "Kick It Complex"-- but it's kind of hard to make a judgment call on anything but the general timbre of her voice when half the words and most of the nuances are buried under all those Missile Command explosion SFX. Less undecipherable is Seasunz, who appears on three tracks and has a way of making relatable sentiments like "everybody party" or "this beat is sick" or "stop global genocide now" sound like fatuous bullshit; the title track's condemnation of "greedy illegitimates, Democratic and Republican/sell guns for funds, indigenous exterminants" might resonate a bit more clearly without such a forcibly highfalutin' attempt at assonance.
If tall bikes had subwoofers, this is the kind of music they'd bump during Critical Mass: A showy obstacle that claims it's resisting merely by existing but doesn't integrate itself into any sort of flow-- traffic, musical or otherwise. Ashton still thinks he can use it to combat the gloss of mainstream rap, as he put it to the East Bay Express earlier this year: "When you think about this music based on this African beat, and it's not this silly white beat, it's a heavy, disturbing, sexual beat, and then over that you have not singing, not making melody, but rhythmic, aggressive yelling. That genre could have done anything, but instead it's become so goofy." Funny-- you'd think a dude like this would hate cultural imperialism.
