Album review: Anti-Pop Consortium / ‘Fluorescent Black’ (Big Dada)
Nov 4th, 2009 | By admin | Category: Big Shot Magazine, Music Reviews
“The professionally ill” APC return to the straits of ghetto sci-fi they helped structure at the top of the decade, and it’s good to have them reunited, sounding clinically and intricately on point.
Lining up backing androids to make up a fivesome over premier hip-hop space beats from Earl Blaize, you can still smell the sludge of the streets from their advanced vantage point. It’s a genre that many try their hand at but fall short on, with APC understanding on the likes of “New Jack Exterminator” that uncluttered, technological progression (“let the track breathe”), is the launchpad for these mic-stronauts. “Shine” and “Superunfrontable” let you feel the electronic pulses surging through the system loud and clear, stripped down to the barest levels on “End Game” going furthest left. Defying physics and momentarily switching off the digital line in, “Timpani” is bonafide weird navigation of a celestial calling rising from the depths. Beans, High Priest and M Sayyid don’t ramble—they play their position as rhymes turn into dictatorship of the beat. “Volcano,” the most bumping of a series of club-ready thumbs, opens up APC as swaggerers through science, slang and satire (“The Solution” taks a page out of El-P’s “Stepfather Factory” guide to family planning), barely breaking sweat until the fleeting panic of “Dragunov” late on.
Matt Oliver
File under: Hangar 18, Mike Ladd, Airborn Audio
