"Independent as fuck." Emblazoned on Company Flow’s 1997 debut album, Funcrusher Plus, this stark slogan guided the underground rap group through their brief career. Company Flow have since disbanded, but co-founder El-P continues to follow the old credo — as the honcho and house producer of his own label, Definitive Jux, he’s carved a jagged, non-conformist path, releasing hip-hop that is abrasive, arty, and defiantly uncommercial. These days, he’s an underground rap kingpin of sorts ("the Steve Albini of hip-hop," the Village Voice recently quipped), snatching up buzzed-about MCs like Cannibal Ox, Aesop Rock, and Mr. Lif and signing on to produce major-label projects like Zack de la Rocha’s solo debut.
It’s no surprise then, then El-P’s long-awaited solo album arrives with the weight and subtlety of an 18-wheeler. Corrosive and uncompromising, Fantastic Damage (Definitive Jux; out May 14) revels in lead-heavy beats, trashy punk sonics, and barreling asymmetrical rhymes. The title is fitting: it’s a sonic shitstorm of fierce and hypnotic beauty.
El-P, who headlines downstairs at the Middle East this Tuesday, has been producing tracks since the mid ’90s, but his technique has progressed over the past couple years. Fantastic Damage is stocked with phantasmagoric beats that drip from the speakers. The towering horrorcore of "Tuned Mass Damper," the psychedelic space rock of "Deep Space 9mm," the boiler-room hiss and moan of "Lazerface" — it’s all as vividly disturbing as a bad acid trip. For true rap-rock fusion, head straight to "Truancy," which sounds like Queens of the Stone Age jamming over the Bomb Squad suffixed with a misty-eyed, dawn-breaks-over-the-Rockies coda.
The building blocks of El-P’s sound are simple to pick out: early-’80s drum-machine-based rap (think Run-DMC’s "Sucker MCs"), freaky ’80s electro, Adrian Sherwood’s On-U-Sound dub-punk productions, Autechre’s micro-managed glitch techno, Tony Iommi riffs, glossy new-age synths, Flipper’s sludge grunge, the RZA’s gothic hip-hop. But it’s the way they crash together that will twist your brain into a knot.
El-P has become the underground version of Timbaland. His productions and theirs are meticulously arranged; each sound is placed perfectly within the mix, with obvious thought about the rhythm and texture of every chopped-up sample. El-P and Timbaland even draw from the same sonic grab bag of ’80s electro sparkles and crystalline new-wave synths. But whereas Timbaland provoke bump ’n’ grind in the clubs, El-P promotes closed-eyed freakouts in blunted basements. It’s still starkly digital, but using gritty, shit-encrusted sounds and rotten, worm-eaten tones, El-P tweaks electro’s utopian futurism with a cynical dose of cyberpunk fatalism. Computer viruses, Internet porn, software monopolies — they’ve all ruined the digital dream. The future is here, he seems to be saying — and it sucks.
The downside to these incredible beats is that El-P’s rhymes become lost inside the tornado of sound. His über-verbose, syllable-crammed, off-beat flow isn’t exactly charismatic to begin with — he sounds as if he had a thesaurus and a couple of William Burroughs novels on his nightstand. Sample lyric: "Who wanna hold hands with this sick malnutrition of something we speak?/Dissolve into the syncopated fragments of violence pass the looseleaf/We can embrace on the business end of my face-first Joe Versus the Volcano suicide leap/Dance with the vinyl monster, devil in blue sky, blind with clean conscience." Uh, pass the Advil.
Back in Company Flow, El-P had the funkafied braggadocio of Bigg Jus to balance him out. On Fantastic Damage, his abstract expressionist spray bathes the entire canvas. Yes, it’s literate and virtuoso, but it’s also exhausting. Call it medicinal music: hip-hop that’s good for you but hard to swallow. Which too bad, because when he gets topical, the results are gripping. Helicopter whirs, napalm blasts refigured as snare hits, and a harrowing first-person lyric make "The Nang (Front, Bush, and Shit)" into a Vietnam portrait as conflicted as Full Metal Jacket. Even more impressive is "Stepfather Factory," an A.I. for emotionally bruised b-boys where El-P morphs into a shifty robot salesman. "Stepfather Factory" is a chilling product of his troubled home life — he rhymed about his real-life abusive stepfather on Funcrusher Plus’s "Last Good Sleep." His knack for dystopic landscapes and polysyllabic paragraphs has turned him into an indie-rap icon, but only when the literate wordsmith writes himself into the story does El-P’s verbal logic come into focus.
EL-P headlines downstairs at the Middle East with Mr. Lif, Aesop Rock, and Vast this Tuesday, May 14. Call (617) 864-EAST.
