cLOUDDEAD are a hip-hop trio from Oakland. Hmmm already I am doing them an injustice. Ok let’s just stick with the basic facts for now. ‘Ten’ is their second album release, the follow-up to their much-lauded self-titled debut, and it is probably the most unique record you’ll hear this year.

It’s hip-hop but only in the sense that cLOUDDEAD use the same styles and techniques like cutting and scratching or sampling. In certain parts it’s more like deranged folk music made by a barbershop quartet of midgets who’ve drank too much Coca-Cola, other times it’s hard to draw comparisons with anything. Tracks can revolve around scratched nursery rhymes, Beach Boys style harmonies, improvised instruments and simple white noise, but the music is fractured and in constant flux. It’s like eavesdropping on Boards Of Canada in therapy.

Lyricists Doseone and why? aren’t so much rappers, as autistic stalkers of a world they capture from hasty snatches of overheard conversations at dusty highway cafes. They are outsiders, always listening in on civilization from the shimmering desert road that surrounds it. Their words are like the beat prose of Kerouac or Burroughs that ranges from the banal (“youngsters today are not prepared to buy plants or collect stamps”) to the inspired (“the makers of guns will never go hungry”) and frequently incomprehensible.

‘Ten’ can be considered a great record simply because of its sheer originality. Yet its unique factors are also to blame for a lack of focus running through it. The songs drift through pleasant and interesting places in a blur and only occasionally do you want to stop and really get to see them. Tracks like ‘The Teen Keen Skip’ and ‘Pop Song’ lack a cohesive composition that would bring all their individual glimpses of genius into one great picture. ‘Rifle Eyes’ and the single ‘Dead Dogs Two’ are the rare occasions this happens and their absolute brilliance makes the rest of the record all the more frustrating.

But let’s not be too greedy. It’s enough that there’s a group out there like cLOUDDEAD making music that is as bizarre and beautiful as ‘Ten’. It won’t be to everyone’s taste but that shouldn’t stop everyone listening to it anyway.

words: Colm Larkin

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