This avant-garde hip-hop stuff is spreading faster than anti-Arab sentiment on September 12th. You know the stuff of which I speak; hip-hop built from samples harder to grasp than a wall of Jell-O, whose time signatures change faster than a 15 year-old girl's fashion sense, all strung around beats dirtier than the old man asleep at the bus stop. Innovators like cLOUDDEAD, El-P, and the Anticon Crew have been redefining what hip-hop is for years now, so it's nice that people are finally starting to take notice. If you've been paying any attention, you know what's bound to happen next: the market will glut, and innovation will make way for imitation. But first, Dälek returns to the scene, fresh off collaborations with Faust, Techno Animal and Kid606, with a sophomore album inventive enough to extend avant-garde hip-hop's stay in the limelight for, at the very least, a few more weeks.
So what is it that makes Dälek-- alongside producer Oktopus, and turntablist/producer Still-- stand out amongst a seeming onslaught of original, challenging hip-hop? Namely that their songs are set to moody musique concrète backdrops that sound like something out of a David Lynch nightmare. Yes, there are rhymes set to hand-drums and cowbells. Yes, the lyrical content would feel more at home in a lit hall than in some trash-ridden alley. Yes, there are times when Dälek opts to speak his vocals rather than rap them. And yes, he's more sensitive than your average bear. But what really separates Dälek from the rest isn't his rabid experimentation as much as the way he builds a bridge between the avant-garde and the traditional.
While his contemporaries experiment with slant-rhyme and abstract poetics, Dälek takes a comparatively standard lyrical approach (assuming you'd consider rhymes like, "Forgot our days in shackles?/ You concentrate on battles?/ I lecture graduates/ Discussing Kant till they leave baffled," standard), setting forcefully delivered rhymes to some of the strangest soundscapes that will ever be labeled 'hip-hop.' Pleas for understanding, cries of frustration, and even the occasional ray of hope weave in and out of music that owes more to 80s Western European industrial music a la Psychic TV and Nurse with Wound than it does to Grandmaster Flash or Public Enemy.
Steering clear of the purposefully vague poetic abstractions of his peers, Dälek prefers to revisit much of the thematic ground that hip-hop culture was built on. He's confused by issues of race (the album opens with a track called "Spiritual Healing," which poses the question: "Who you pray to, my God, the black God?/ Who you pray to, my God, the brown God?/ Who you pray to, my God, the white God?/ Your reaction's kind of odd for a kid who loves to nod"), frustrated by his confusion ("I vent my anger on all angles/ Would strangle angels if they'd let me"), yet certain all the while that the answers lie in the past, never ashamed to look to his predecessors for clues in his eternal quest for understanding ("Remember days of cardboard, fat lace, and Krylon?/ Microphones and twelves, tools we all relied on/ Niggas dropped a verse, the thought was one to die on/ I remember hip-hop, that's my Mt Zion").
If Dälek's skill lies largely in his ability to merge the traditional with the unusual, then perhaps it's somewhat ironic that From Filthy Tongue of Gods and Griots' finest moment is its most atypical. A twelve-minute epic called "Black Smoke Rises" serves as the album's centerpiece, a defining moment that sees Dälek all but abandoning any and all rules of hip-hop. "Black Smoke" is all atonal drones, hisses and shrieks that build and build, computer bleeps that pierce the atmosphere like an alarm clock pierces through sleep, ghostly vocals that linger ominously on the horizon, coaxing the nervous listener to come closer. Throbbing Gristle is the closest reference point I can manage, with Dälek playing the role of Genesis P. Orridge, calmly intoning a mantra ("Black smoke rises to a heaven I do not know/ Slowly gaze to take in our sorrow") that bobs peacefully in and out of the murky chaos. His words float through the listeners' consciousness, eventually overtaken by the building drones. The grinding noise escalates and Dälek plays the now-cliché part of the emotional emcee. But his introspective spoken words transcend the obvious. As he longs for a soul he once knew, the listener catches himself uncertain if Dälek's referring to a lover, a more innocent world, or himself.
Such ambiguity rears its head again on "Trampled Brethren," built around a vocal sample that warns, "So that we would be denied the knowledge of who we are, this was taken out of the history books several centuries ago. And, of course, it hasn't been put back yet." Standard hip-hop fare, sure. But by placing it against a backdrop of Eastern Indian instrumentation, Dälek denies the surface interpretation, reminding listeners that injustice and oppression is something happening everywhere, to everyone.
"Forever Close My Eyes" is universal in a different way. Depressed, though never whiny, Dälek embeds a refrain of, "My yesterdays don't matter now, they're gone/ Your careless expression left my wrists torn.../ Yesterdays don't matter now, you're gone/ Shattered glass of empty bottles cut my palms," in a glorious bed of e-bowed guitar feedback a la Fripp & Eno's No Pussyfooting.
As an emcee, Dälek shows off a rare versatility, equally capable of straight rhyming and formless spoken word. As a poet, Dälek has a grasp on subtlety that most will never approach. And as a collective, Dälek have achieved the seemingly impossible: successfully bridging the conventional and the experimental in a way that respects both at once. It's a risky endeavor-- one that threatens to alienate fans of both disciplines. But it's this very risk that makes Dälek's music so very affecting.
