I hope you’re ready for new Analog Mutants LP Brothers Of Invention. Why? Because it’s a beast. And in addition to that it’s been twelve years (!) in production. But mainly because it’s a beast. Not that you’d expect anything less given the three personnel involved – to wit: veteran Connecticut rapper Phill Most Chill and producer DJ Snafu of Bankrupt Europeans with DJ Grazzhopper on the cut. We all know PMC of course – rapper since ’83, career resurgence in the mid ’00s (working with the likes of DJ Format, Jorun Bombay, Djar One, Mr Fantastic, Krash Slaughta, Bankrupt Euros) while Snafu and European DMC champion Grazzhoppa’s discographies also speak for themselves. Indeed so prolific have all involved been over the last decade and more that when you also factor in the fact that one ‘mutant’ lives on one side of the Atlantic and the other two live on the opposite side but not in the same country, it’s hardly surprising things have taken as long as they have, even with the internet facilitating things.
And so to this album – a giant twenty-two track opus including the three previous singles (among them 22’s Speak Easy/ I’m On Vacation (808 Mix), 23’s Confidence/ If You let ‘Em and 24’s Tittyshaker). Almost exclusively uptempo (fast rap is pretty much the law if you work with PMC), the AM sound overseen by Snafu foregrounds drums, bass and bars. Samples are present of course and in a variety of sonic hues as befits the magpie-like instincts of a true disciple of hip-hop culture (with heavy funk, 60s RnB, the intro to a certain northern soul Jimi cover, Latin boogaloo and multiple genres of jazz all represented) but act primarily as rhythmic augmentation (as befits a genre born from funk), never dominating as in the work of some producers.
Our Phill’s rhymes meanwhile range across topics as multifarious as big tech interference in privacy (Drones), friends and relatives (If Ya Let Em), feelings (Anger and Confidence), his own prodigious mic skills (Leroy Brown) and, among other things, er, shaking your titties, on Tittyshaker. The latter represents a playful side to certainly the final quarter of the LP with a Sesame Street-ish air to the swing/shuffle beat. It’s a vibe that also characterises the track immediately preceding it (Speakeasy on which Phill puts wack MCs in their place – “And only because I care, I let you know you won’t pass/ until you take your ass to that remedial emceeing class”) and the garage-rock-powered, speed-rap WTF Was That about surreal experiences on prodigious weed. More conventional boom-bap can be found in one of the album’s more sedate cuts, the aforementioned If Ya Let ‘Em as well as the uptempo Can You Feel It from early on in the set that will appeal to Allergies fans. Indeed the Allergies connect can be found more directly at around the halfway point in the skit length Allergies Freestyle which first made its appearance on an Allergies podcast. Grazzhoppa’s skills are shown to devastating effect all over the place but arguably never more devastatingly than on Overlord Of Fresh which makes one motif out of a well-known KRS-ONE phrase and another (the one which gives the track its name) from one by Funky Dividends. The monkey’s favourite tracks however are Leroy Jones, Drones and the LP mix of former B-side I’m On Vacation in its Latin guise. The first delivers some of the LP’s best lyrical putdowns (“must be some real bad shit he’s smokin’/ Either that or the microphone’s broken…praise real rappers, all the rest get ignored/ till I put a sharp rhyme through your chest like a sword”), the second delivers a searing critique of modern society (“But we’re conditioned to follow along without wondering, ‘Why all the madness?’/ What’s really bad is even when we understand it, we still demand it”) and the third is the LP’s biggest dancefloor banger.
Analog Mutants then, it might have taken over a decade to complete and release this album but brothers done worked it out.
(Out now on Nobody Buys Records)