It’s been a while since I’ve listened to any Anticon records, but Dose always held a special place in my heart for the role he played in my musical education as an employee at Amoeba in Berkeley in the mid-to-late 90s. He and Dax both taught me a lot by answering a lot of annoying questions I posed. (I have Dose to thank for showing me Freestyle Fellowship and I have Dax to thank for hipping me to “The Soft Bulletin”.)
In any case, this new record seems to pick up where Themselves left off, which is: bass-heavy, noise-drenched, melody-forward and sample-heavy orchestrations of rap-songs about life and death and boring everyday stuff made funny. And, Dose has one of the weirdest nasal deliveries that I find totally ingratiating and not off-putting, somehow, because he understands how his pitch fits into his music like any other element. There’s a lot going on, on every track, but none of it feels chaotic thanks to some solid engineering. As for thematics, nothing new here, too, based on a first pair of listens. That said, the lyrics don’t quite register yet outside the experience of the songs. But I think I’ll keep it on repeat for a while yet. Click it to get it. And be on the look out for a few mainstream steals, in particular on the album closer.
