Warp

If J-Live celebrates a return to roots, then Anti-Pop Consortium are hip hop uprooted, making the kind of rap that only record store geeks deem safe listening. Rather than following through on the music’s forebears, they stretch it to its outer limits, showing off its capacity for outward expansion. Screw soul, they seem to say—theirs is the sound of extraterrestrial mechs appropriating hip hop for twisted, brilliant experiments.

Anti-Pop are hip hop’s Autechre, sounding far-out on first listen but making perfect sense on the fifth (appropriately, they’re also on the UK’s experimental Warp label). As former slam poets, emcees Priest, Beans and M. Sayyid rhyme multisyllables like androids possessed by funk, their unfathomable words sounding vaguely familiar at times—like lyrics about hip hop lyrics. They attack the mic with a coordinated fervor not seen since early Wu-Tang or Souls of Mischief, or even the Beastie Boys.

But the tracks are the main attraction on their new album, Arrhythmia—12 mind-bending pieces machine-scrubbed to freshness. “Dead In Motion” is infested by computer glitches that threaten to tear the song apart as electric squelches and null-lines further the sense of claustrophobia. “Ping Pong” uses, appropriately, the sound of bouncing ping pong balls to accentuate its streamlined boom-bap. “Silver Heat” juxtaposes jazzy scat with fat analog bass, and “Mega” swells suddenly into an awesome Wagnerian attack replete with synthetic symphony, choir and ovation. True to their name, Anti-Pop’s music borders on the absurd, thriving on its excesses. Arrhythmia is the consortium’s best work yet, eschewing the muffled bleakness of their debut Tragic Epilogue for an all-out attack on the senses.

These albums are especially strong testaments to hip hop’s vitality and versatility, to be sure, but their release is business as usual for the artists—uncelebrated, unseen. With stuff like this happening every month, who needs an old, joyless news anchor telling us what not to like?