The Modern Vanguard.

Lil Ugly Mane

Hailing from Richmond, Virginia, Lil Ugly Mane might well prove the dauphin of the Sippin’ on Some Syrup generation. Possessing (as in The Exorcist) a style reminiscent of that classic Southern hip hop, even his self-designed album art reminds one of the makeshift gaudiness of Three 6 Mafia album covers. Magic Potty Baby Bitch from his Criminal Hypnosis: Unreleased Shit tape definitively exemplifies his style, insidious, threatening and conspiratorial: “When you see the whole block blocked off / You can bet ya bottom dollar Ugly Mane popped off”.

His flow swings from a stony, laid-back drawl to rapid-fire capsules of street-weary admonishment. Often he alternates between the two in one song. From the requiem-like Throw Dem Gunz to the dizzy winding of Maniac Drug Dealer III, his lyrics are witty, evocative and unrelentingly despaired. “Bitch, I’m morose and lugubrious / I’ma let the Uzi spit / Turn his face into gooey shit”.

His mixtape Mista Thug Isolation was one of the best releases of 2012 and Bitch I’m Lugubrious its crowning jewel. The original is eerily jaunty, with a piano-furnished beat that sounds like the music played in the elevator before you step out to see the glimmer of the serial killer’s knife. But there is also a strange, echoing three-note pitch that loops throughout, reminiscent of the tones that sound before a PA announcement is made. The beat suddenly becomes the muzak played over the speakers in a mental asylum to placate the patients and the lyrics simply the voice inside the heads of the psych ward residents. Ultimately it’s the Cold Shoulder Edit, with its heavy, nightmarish beats and low, sinister bass that transmutes the song into its intended form, a stoned and frightening dirge. It courses into your ear canal and sends those chills shooting up your spine like a hollow-point.

Roland Reject

Roland’s flow is familiar and comfortable, wearing his influences on his sleeve – even has his own Wolf Haley who tells Roland to “Step into the confessional today, my child” – and matching his streetwise and idiomatic cadence. “Twenty-three with no degree”, he says in defiance instead of apathy. On his debut mixtape AYFN (A Year From Now) he imbues every verse with humour and humanity, rhyming Wiz Khalifa with “Nice to meet ya”, and possessing a studied clarity throughout, “Niggas that like to test me, I’m aware of it all / They desperate to seek attention, unaware of their flaws”.

What separates Roland in particular from his peers is his marshalling of his own emotions, while remaining mindful of their ultimate might. On Purple Train Wreck, one of the most unique recordings of the year in both concept and execution, he laments “Man, sometimes it sucks being black / Though it might not be a fact, I’m still entitled to that”. But while he laments, he never bemoans and more over, he simply observes. Such is his catharsis. He doesn’t give a fuck who gives a fuck and he “don’t give a fuck back” and suggests “If we ain’t walk the same path then stop comparing our shoes”. This isn’t the only display of his solid command of metaphor.

Despite the rife lamentation, “Till the death of me” being less a hook than a dirge-like litany, Roland effortlessly avoids melodrama and his work is suffused with a sense of searching instead of longing. AYFN is an ultimately triumphant work, despite or perhaps in spite of Roland’s steadfast fidelity to his perceptions. Eye-on-the-prize and the chops to reach it, there’s a place in an upcoming XXL Freshman Class waiting for Roland Reject.

Iamsu!

His mission statement is as terse as it is tenacious. “I don’t wanna hurt nobody, I’m just all about my profit”, he affirms on Mobbin’ from his 2012 mixtape $uzy 6 $peed. “West side four fingers, count too much money for you broke niggas” and whether that’s true or not, it’s said with such don’t-give-a-fuck ambivalence it doesn’t even matter. His synth-heavy beats, replete with tinny snare hits and pneumatic-sounding open hats, are the kind of chart-happy honey pots that the mainstream goes ape shit for.

But as much as the sonic trajectory points towards mainstream, there’s an almost emphatic insistence on rapping throughout his output, betokening a mind that is both mature and possesses a genuine love for the art form. He refuses to rest on the laurels of the beat like so many rappers do, many of whom are in the charts right now taking up the real estate Iamsu! ought to be occupying. His punchlines are overt without being predictable, “Later on still counting ends / Got your girlfriend wetter than a fountain is” and he scrunches, wiggles, twists and manoeuvres syllables cleverly and seamlessly, “She a, dirty, bitch, man, she need peni-cil-lin”.

And if you’re anything like me, you’re a sucker for a hometown call-out in a song: “Harbor way riding down the South Side / 18th in Ohio, my first bike ride”. Smooth nostalgia. Speaking of, if you needed any more proof he’s in it for the verbal flex as much as the dollars, check out his 2011 mixtape The Miseducation Of IamSu! Yeah, you read the title right. Intro? Nothin’ But A ‘G’ Thang. Go figure.

…Like Clockwork is less of an assault than previous Queens of the Stone Age records. It invites the listener warmly into the boudoir, and while you’re naturally reticent, you tip-toe in and ease into a chair. What occurs in the room is painful, elegiac and exploratory. Josh Homme is chasing the feelings in his head and for once, the feelings don’t just revolve around dirty parts. Though he sometimes gets a little too pontifical for his own good: “Lies are a funny thing / They slip through your fingertips because they never happened to you”, this album is about righting the wrongs, revelling in the rights and accepting the wrongs that will forever remain un-right. “I got bruises and hickies, stitches and scars” sings Homme.

…Like Clockwork is an unrelentingly Josh Homme record. A man driving in a muscle car through the twilight of his mind, his ego and his id are twin highways through which he snakes and veers. The man is wiser, the band is wiser. The record sounds like a distillation of the previous albums much like 2007’s Era Vulgaris was, but …Like Clockwork is a far more congruent work and as a result reaps far more satisfaction. Here Homme mobilises his own strengths and the strengths of the band he’s been in for over a decade.

Glass breaking, eery. Keep Your Eyes Peeled is built on thick, crunchy, warbling bass and disjointed-sounding drums. The chorus has steely, wah guitar that slips out quickly like tentacles whipping out of the earth on an alien planet. Though the breakdown and chorus of I Sat By The Ocean is a slight letdown, relying on the usual bait-and-switch of QOTSA’s more lacklustre choruses, it doesn’t detract from the verses—awesomely groovy struts with Little Sister-like guitar licks. Homme was always one for melody and less one for hooks. The track finally lets loose at the end, bringing a sublime release to the tension that’s been building since the beginning.

The Vampyre of Time and Memory consolidates the album’s most emphatic themes. Homme gets explicit, “I want God to come and take me home / ‘cause I’m all alone in this crowd”. Sweet, seductive piano is matched by Homme’s sweet but sly vocals. Tracks like this make …Like Clockwork the most self-assured QOTSA record since their self-titled debut. If I Had a Tail is almost honky-tonk and contains some of the band’s token sleaze. “I wanna suck, I wanna lick”. Meh, it’s nice to know they still wanna get down. The album is always sonically interesting and even when it starts to rock, it never loses sight of the groove, handling it like putty and moulding it to its own fancy. The song ends with a thrusting breakdown of beefy, grainy-sounding guitars. My God is the Sun reminisces on the insistent propulsion of Songs for the Deaf with rapid fire guitar licks and sublime, winding riffs.

The danceable sex-funk of Smooth Sailing serves to make Homme’s weariness throughout the rest of the album more emphatic while being highly enjoyable on its own merits. On Fairweather Friends he’s utterly morose. The eerie winding at the end of the track recalls the schizophrenia of Era Vulgaris, but like everything else on …Like Clockwork, is a far more precise and captained effort, handled with more wisdom and intelligence than feeling and cocksureness. The lush, beautiful glory of I Appear Missing is a chase scene that goes over land and sea before ascending into the sky and disappearing from sight. It slowly uncoils itself, revealing a barbed but tender soul inside.

The album closes with the title track. “And I’m swimming in the light, chasing down the moon / Deeper in the water, the more I long for you”. Homme stands alone in the spotlight accompanied by fuzzy, velvety guitars and a daunting, impending horn sounding in the background. It is unlike any QOTSA song before it. It doesn’t even compare to previous hushed efforts like Mosquito Song, Into the Hollow or Make it Wit Chu. “Holding on too long is just fear of letting go”. Never truer words said. The song ends the album with a piercing web of strings that end abruptly before they get a chance to spread out and echo, snuffed out by silence.

Sharp, precise production, thick, booming percussion, slinky, crunchy guitars. Every song is lean and on-point. Homme checks his falsetto, keeping it the welcome honey pot that punctuates precise moments on the album. Where previous Queens of the Stone Age albums echoed with laughter, fat on their own excesses, …Like Clockwork is succinct and studied. It isn’t a collection of feel-good-till-you-feel-sick jams that you pass the bong around to, it is definitively an album. A slowly unweaving suite that cradles you with one arm while it toys with you with the other. The lack of sex-obsessed, diesel-fueled stoner rawk might disappoint some listeners just looking to rock out with their cocks out, and when it’s time to spark up fans will assuredly defer to Rated R or the self-titled debut, but none of this means that …Like Clockwork isn’t QOTSA’s best album to date.

The worst part is that for a band whose credo is apparently one of whimsical yet thoughtful hedonism, there isn’t a single point on Cave Rave in which the band actually get indulgent. If anything, they avoid it like the plague. Pringle comes off less like a merry spiritualist and more like an exhausted fatalist who’s convinced himself that his own fairy world is better than whatever joy you can sap from real life. Cave Rave is an album of diminishing returns, every listen uncovering more things to dislike about it, while exhausting the things you do.

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It probably isn’t surprising, given their epic popularity, but Radiohead’s Kid A is still the definitive benchmark for weird. That is, weird in music, which is the only weird that can be experienced for free and at minimal cost to your bandwidth, making it, ironically, the most accessible form of weird that there is. The legendary culture wonk Paul Morley, in his book Words and Music: A History of Pop in the Shape of a City, a chronicle of his travels through pop music history with a robotic Kylie Minogue, included a list of 88 albums for “if you think Radiohead’s Kid A is weird.” It always struck me as absurd that Radiohead’s meditation on not sounding like Radiohead was considered all that avant-garde, particularly when you consider that it was composed of sounds most kids could get out of an hour of fucking around with Fruity Loops. Furthermore, it really wore its influences on its sleeve. In particular, the album owes an appreciable amount of its aesthetics to Warp Records and their artists Aphex Twin and Autechre. The British label’s latest release Cold Spring Fault Less Youth by London duo Mount Kimbie, probably owes as much to Kid A as it does to Selected Ambient Works Volume II. It’s the taste of a new generation.

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1. He’s a rebel in Hollywood.

Milius himself once said “I’ve always been considered a nut. They kind of tolerate me. It’s certainly affected me. I’ve been blacklisted for a large part of my career because of my politics - as surely as any writer was blacklisted back in the 1950s. It’s just that my politics are from the other side, and Hollywood always veers left.” Whatever your own politics, this is a statement that takes sheer balls to make.

The natural contrarian and self-described Zen anarchist completely disregards the Hollywood machine that keeps people quiet in fear of losing their investors or their jobs. He has been an outspoken critic of studio executives and the embedded mechanics of the whole studio system. He is a former member of the Board of Directors of the NRA, being an avid gun collector and a renowned authority on firearms and military history. Following his own true North, Milius pursues projects that are close to his heart with people he respects. He is currently in talks with RZA of the Wu-Tang Clan, a filmmaker in his own right, to direct his script on the life of Genghis Khan.

An unsung hero of film, Steven Spielberg had this to say of Milius’ integral part in the New Hollywood: “John is our scoutmaster. He’s the one who will tell you to go on a trip and only take enough food, enough water for one day, and make you stay out longer than that. He’s the one who says, ‘Be a man. I don’t want to see any tears.’ He’s a terrific raconteur, a wonderful story teller. John has more life than all the rest of us put together.”

2. His work.

Dirty Harry, Dillinger, Magnum Force, Big Wednesday, Apocalypse Now, Conan the Barbarian, Red Dawn, Farewell to the King, Clear and Present Danger and Rome. Milius has served as either writer, director or both on all of these projects. As a screenwriter Milius is responsible for “I love the smell of napalm in the morning”, “Charlie don’t surf”, “Terminate, with extreme prejudice”, “Go ahead, make my day” and the “Do you feel lucky?” speech becoming staples of the pop culture zeitgeist.

A case of chronic asthma having kept him out of the Marine Corps and service in Vietnam, Milius became an expert on combat and military history. “It was totally demoralising,” he said “I missed going to my war. It probably caused me to be obsessed with war ever since.” This obsession with war led Milius to spend the rest of his creative life documenting the psychologies involved in combat.

From the brutal urban war zone of the Dirty Harry films, to Vietnam in Apocalypse Now, to the Cold War in Red Dawn and Clear and Present Danger (bringing dynamism to Tom Clancy’s rather anaemic novel, his first draft featuring an ending in which Cortez is killed in a mugging by drug addicts) or the sword and sorcery warfare of Conan the Barbarian, which brought Arnold Schwarzenegger to prominence in Hollywood.

3. He was instrumental in the formation of the UFC.

Besides being an active surfer, Milius was an ardent fan of martial arts and a student of Rorion Gracie, of the world-famous Gracie family. Through Rorion, Milius met marketing executive Art Davie, who was interested in putting together a pay-per-view martial arts competition. Davie had been working with the Gracie family on a series of videos titled “Gracies in Action” which featured members of the family using Jiu-Jitsu to take on masters of other martial arts.

Milius came on board as creative director and his contribution to the nascent fighting competition was two-fold. On the one hand, the famous and respected director/screenwriter brought credibility and a name to the project, enticing investors. The first notice released to the public advertising the competition requested fighters to participate in a “War of the Worlds” event sponsored by “John Milius of Red Dawn and Conan the Barbarian fame.”

His second and arguably most significant contribution was the suggestion of holding the fights inside of a cage. To distinguish themselves from boxing and other martial arts competitions and to avoid fighters falling out of a square ring when action intensifies, Milius suggested having the fighters compete inside of an eight-sided steel cage and thus the UFC’s famous Octagon was born. It is now a registered trademark and symbol of the company.

4. He is the inspiration for Walter Sobchak.

Who is Walter Sobchak? He’s a fucking veteran! He did not watch his buddies die face-down in the muck to be asked such things!

The Big Lebowski is a 1998 dark comedy written and directed by the Coen Brothers. One of the most re-watchable films ever made, The Big Lebowski concerns an unemployed former-hippie and amateur bowler named The Dude, who gets roped into a complicated kidnapping plot after two men break into his house one night demanding money, one of them peeing on his beloved rug (it really tied the room together).

The Dude’s best friend is a man named Walter Sobchak, who the Coens based on their good friend John Milius. A security specialist by trade, Walter is a devout Jew (converted) and an ardent bowler. A slightly obsessed Vietnam War veteran, his short fuse leaves him prone to pulling a 9mm out on a bowling lane to settle a dispute over scores and destroying a Ferrari with a tire iron when he’s fucked in the ass by a brat (figuratively speaking).

But for all the bluster Walter has an unfaltering moral compass and in his barrel chest beats the heart of a good friend. He’ll protect you from murderous nihilists, operate a car on Shabbos just to drive you to Pasadena and he’ll even get you a toe by 3 o’clock this afternoon, with nail polish! He is the perfect counterpoint to the laid-back pacifism of the Dude, enhancing both that character and the film as a whole in ways no other character could.

Walter Sobchak is the Bret Hart of badass characters: the best there is, the best there was and the best there ever will be. Yes, you read that correctly, the real John Milius, writer behind Harry Callahan, Conan the Barbarian and Colonel Kurtz, inspired a character more badass than any of his own.

In a film school writing class, the lecturer, an Australian screenwriter of some note (you can probably guess which one, there’s only, like, three of them), told us that if we take anything away from his lectures, it should be the following: make sure the audience always knows what’s going on, even when they don’t. We each etched the advice into our notebooks and returned to our collective stupor before snapping back to lucidity when the the next film clip hit the screen.

It was a solid piece of advice. But dare I say it, he omitted the last and probably most important part of the axiom: make sure they care. If the audience isn’t interested, hell, they don’t want to know what’s going on. You know the feeling yourself, a film is so convoluted that the campfire-sitting tribalist inside of you naturally wants to figure it all out, but it’s so long and tedious that you’re almost too tired to bother. Make sure the audience cares. Always. It is this part that Dead Man Down, the English-language debut of original The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo director Niels Arden Oplev, forgot to write down in its notebook.

Colin Farrell plays a brooding mob enforcer (oh, aren’t they all brooding?) whose life changes when he meets his troubled neighbour, played by Prometheus’ Noomi Rapace. Rapace, who’s been left damaged both physically and psychologically after being stuck by a judge’s car, witnesses Farrell committing a murder. In exchange for keeping quiet she asks him to commit another murder for her. But Farrell has revenge plans of his own, the target of his machinations, his employer, ruthless mob boss Alphonse, played by Terrence Howard.

For an unfair length of time, the film’s plot remains at a virtual standstill. Besides giving the audience enough time to piece together the film’s ultimate twist (which naturally is telegraphed very early on) this lethargic pacing also comes at the cost of the film’s narrative momentum. The film is rife with twists and turns, making for a complicated plot where there is no need for one and bisects the film into two separate narratives, neither of which is very interesting. It detaches the audience from the characters and sacrifices the thematic elements of the film.

Farrell, always the dependable one, brings solid and believable acting to an uninspired character and Rapace is enjoyable as the neighbour Beatrice. The two surprisingly share a rather warm chemistry. Howard’s performance as the mob boss is intense and genuinely intimidating and there is also solid support provided by Dominic Cooper and Isabelle Huppert, who plays Rapace’s mother. There are several good action sequences and while the less animated scenes are well-acted, no amount of credulity can get past the force field that the sloppy script erects between film and audience. While as slick and stylish as we’ve come to expect from a Danish filmmaker, Dead Man Down is unfortunately a rather wan Hollywood debut for Mr. Oplev.

Sonically Monomania is a response to Deerhunter’s previous album, Halcyon Digest. It is similarly a variegated and sweeping song set that knows that while the heart is a major asshole, he’s damn near charitable when compared to the mind. But unlike Digest, the fey, male-Bilinda Butcher vocals of past Deerhunter and Atlas Sound albums have been traded in for a much harsher, larynx-bruising timbre. It works surprisingly well and matches the rawer, grainier sound bed that Bradford Cox has to sing over. Mercifully, the band has strayed even further away from the wretchedness of shoegaze and dream pop, proving that while they do it well, they refuse to let it incarcerate them as so many bands do.

Raucous songs like Neon Junkyard, Leather Jacket II, Dream Captain and the sly Blue Agent are powerful and noisy treks through the cold darkness of the night. Imagine yourself walking in the middle of nowhere, an utterly lightless part of town, the moon choked out by clouds. You can’t see anything in front of you but you find comfort in the fact that a friend is somewhere near you, even though you cannot see them. The band regresses slightly with Lockett Pundt number The Missing, the guitars are cleaner and the melodies are sweet and crystalline. It is a highlight on the album.

Pensacola starts off with stuttering Bo Diddley guitars and country noise before launching itself in the opposite direction, hurtling towards Strokes-lite indie for the rest of the track. As for Bo Diddley and country/western: “I can’t hold a match to that stuff and I never will. I’ll never be black, I’ll never have that experience. That’s what’s missing from indie culture, though: Bo Diddley and blackness. There’s a struggle that exists in black music and hillbilly music from a certain era.” That’s a quote from Bradford Cox himself. Besides keeping with his general earnest pompousness, it telegraphs one of the most perplexing things about Monomania. For a guy with enough interesting and unique struggle in his own life, why does Cox decide to stick to the same schlocky neuroses we can get on any other indie album?

Monomania is a two-act play. The first act establishes the theme and plot and hooks the audience, the second abandons the plot and completely disregards the audience. Songs like T.H.M., Sleepwalking, Back to the Middle, Nitebike and Punk (La Vie Antérieure) are filler at best and meandering annoyances at worst.

Monomania is the work of a musical mind almost maniacally obsessed with aesthetics and the avant-garde, of someone who’s so familiar with garage conventions and pop composition that he sees through them like the Matrix, but someone who doesn’t necessarily have anywhere to take them. “As a homosexual, my job is to simply sodomise mediocrity,” Cox said in a recent interview. It’s flawed thinking to assume that just because you’re avoiding embedded norms that you’re somehow avoiding the mundane. The tacked-on jams and filler songs throughout Monomania are not only annoying but also directionless. Not directionless as in not being sure of where it’s going, but directionless as in not having anywhere to go.

It’s an ironic twist of fate that one of the English language’s most consistently beloved books revolving around themes that remain timeless could inspire so much impermanence. Every adaptation of the book has been utterly forgettable. Perhaps this is why Baz Luhrman’s The Great Gatsby, the latest adaptation of the F. Scott Fitzgerald “Required Readings List” staple, is obsessed with being contemporary. In order to secure its own legacy it caters to the modern audience’s sensibilities. Contemporariness is the first of its twin obsessions. The other, seemingly favoured, sibling is unmitigated splendour. The film is adorned with every sort of visual spectacle from 3D rendering to cartoonishly vibrant colour schemes to an all-star cast, making it a tangible encapsulation of the sort of gaudy opulence Fitzgerald made his life’s work documenting. And while that may lead some critics to call the film a “splashy, trashy opera” there’s nothing necessarily wrong any of this. A director’s allegiance lies only with his investors (first) and with his own creative vision. Luhrman’s perception of The Great Gatsby is perfectly valid regardless of how well it captures the supposed “heart” of Fitzgerald’s book.

Thus, if we are to examine the film’s soundtrack we should do so in a vacuum. Separate it from the film and ask “How is it as a listen?” The soundtrack is similar to the film in all the aforementioned respects: gaudy glitziness and opulence, star power and almost neurotic contemporariness. The irony of The Great Gatsby is further exaggerated in this 14-track Jay Z-piloted vehicle, as once again we are presented with something that’s utterly ephemeral and really quite forgettable. Album opener 100$ Bill, a Jay Z original contains a beat that sounds like a b-cut from the Watch the Throne sessions that should’ve made it to the album. Clips from the film that centre mostly on Gatsby’s wheelings and dealings play throughout and Hova does his thing with style and seamless flow but ultimately there’s nothing spectacular or ear-grabbing besides the interesting beat.

This is followed by an awkward electro cover of Amy Winehouse’s Back to Black by André 3000 and Beyoncé. Beyonce’s vocals, besides being too polished for such a song, sings in a strangely affected cadence which just becomes annoying. Young and Beautiful, the original from Lana Del Rey, whose output thus far makes her the an obvious choice for such a project, possesses all the hallmarks of that aforementioned output. It’s melodious, grand, smoky and melodramatic, but oddly enjoyable in spite of these things. Jack White’s cover of U2’s Love is Blindness is an utter mess, the jazzy rendering of Crazy in Love sung by Emeli Sandé (there’s a lot of accented e’s on this album) sounds like an inelegant cross between the opening of a Woody Allen film and the Star Wars cantina music, Sandé vocals sound similar to Beyoncé’s and don’t bring anything new to the modern classic.

The big-band theme continues with the refrain of will.i.am’s Bang Bang, the horns give way to a hard-hitting electro beat that’s as inane as anything will.i.am has released since Boom Boom Pow. Similar praise would go to A Little Party Never Killed Nobody (All We Got), a collaboration between Fergie, Q-Tip and GoonRock. Back to jazz with a re-recording of Roxy Music’s Love is the Drug. Terrible. But I never liked the original either. Gotye’s Hearts a Mess is as good as it ever was but sounds out of place sandwiched between some film dialogue and Coco O’s unremarkable Where the Wind Blows. Same goes for No Church In the Wild, this time wedged between film dialogue and Florence + the Machine’s Over the Love, which on the album just sounds like Young and Beautiful 2.0

Funnily enough, the album plays like a karaoke machine at one of Gatsby’s parties if he held it in the West Egg of today. Every artist featured would be in attendance, sloppy on Chartreuse and Chivas Regal, taking their pick from the machine’s playlist before belting out overwrought and affected renditions of the songs. Naturally, they come out sounding as embarrassing and self-indulgent as when you and your friends do it. 

If Talib Kweli is conscious hip hop, is Waka Flocka Flame unconscious hip hop? Inconscious hip hop? What then is Chief Keef? Deep Puddle Dynamics? Is all other hip hop specifically not conscious? 2Pac had some incredibly aware lyrics but he never had such a label applied to his music. Perhaps it just didn’t exist yet? Prisoner of Conscious, the latest dispatch from that most prohibitive of genres, from its foremost exemplar, is supposedly a punch right to the gut of the idea of conscious hip hop. A calculated punch at that, but just how on target is it?

The post-intro opener Human Mic is a rather energising orchestral affair that matches Kweli’s angry cadence to combine into something epic and powerful, but the cheesy beats of Turnt Up then give way to the Curtis Mayfield-like soundbed of Come Here, where Kweli sounds out of place alongside Miguel’s vocals. The atmosphere (and subsequently the album) is ruined. Had Kweli decided to stick with the style of Human Mic his newest release could have been something special. Kweli may have been better off tackling this album with one producer with whom he works well, which is what made Liberation, his one EP collaboration with Madlib, such an interesting and enjoyable listen.

The synths on Ready Set Go are as awkward as the hook is boring. Hold It Now includes a great cut-up beat produced by Stones Throw alum Oh No and Kweli’s vocals are perfectly matched, making it one of the few peaks of the album. Push Thru features Curren$y and Kendrick Lamar who both contribute solid verses over a great horn-punctuated beat, the autotuned Glen Reynolds-sung hook however sounds totally out of place. The second half of the album plays much like the first, the sonic trajectory plotted all over the map. Even the awkward synths reappear on Upper Echelon.

There’s nothing on Prisoner of Conscious as mobilising as Get By or as seductive as Respiration, or anything possessing the fuck ‘em all posture of Eardrum. But what’s really lacking is the cohesion of something like his Train of Thought album with his Reflection Eternal project. You will struggle to find lyrics sharper or alas more conscious than those on Prisoner of Conscious, but for all its righteousness there is a lack of dynamism—best put by Jay Z when he checked him on The Black Album.

There’s some politics for the sake of politics, for example coming out in defence of Mumia Abu Jamal (almost undoubtedly a murderer) on It Only Gets Better. Push Thru name-checks the Arab Spring “Let myself in, fighting for freedom like the people in Tunisia / Spread through Sudan and Egypt, this the music for the movement”. Hey, give some props to those in the thick of it! But even so, the tight rhythms and alert lyrics are quintessential Kweli and it’s comforting to hear his trademark cadence spitting some of his characteristically sharp and wordy rhymes.

His desire to “paint a picture with a pen like Norman Mailer” though, leads him occasionally to fumble lyrically as well, jamming obscure verbiage into bars that would work far better with simpler words. “A family guy, I’m not Brian, Stewie, or Peter / I’m using poetic licence like onomatopoeia”. His metaphors too are sometimes lax, such as “Your whole style is colder than Minnesota” on Come Here. Even the Attack of the Clones reference on Get By is sounding increasingly dated.

There seems to be a tether that restricts Kweli from ever displaying a kind of carefree ambulation. He stumbles when he’s perfectly capable of walking. His albums and many of his songs don’t flow as sublimely as his lyrics. He doesn’t seem the type self-indulgent enough to be making music for himself and if his lyrics are anything to go by, he’s not interested in being a rung on the Top 40 ladder either. So why does the tower of Talib lean so precariously towards the accessible and the commercial?

Perhaps the answer is in the title. If Kweli truly is imprisoned by the “conscious hip hop” label then his mis-steps are a result of this unfortunate incarceration. This new album is as symptomatic of his confinement as any other, replete with botched attempts at a jailbreak. Ironically, it’s when he resists his own conventions that he comes out sounding the most conventional. The rhymes, again, are on point, but there’s a certain chutzpah that’s missing from these songs. And when they’re cued beside each other, it results in a weak total product. There is a way to “stay relevant with…music [while] still being considered conscious” and Kweli certainly has the faculties to find it. Maybe he ought to take a few tips from Jay?