Each week, The Perfect Chord looks back at albums you may have missed when they dropped, or miss now that they’ve faded from memory. This week’s glimpse into the crates:
Dälek – Absence
Less than thirty years into its existence, Hip Hop had settled into adulthood as a musical genre. The shock of its newness had worn off; in fact, it had carved its own particular niche in popular culture, largely because the corporate music establishment that had initially written it off as a passing fad had realized the staying power of the genre and had coopted the marketable elements of it. Similar with what happened to Rock and R&B before it (and Punk and Metal along with it), Hip Hop became part of the mainstream. With that came the predictable compartmentalizing of popular trends within the genre; despite having a group of artists as diverse as Digital Underground, N.W.A., Big Daddy Kane, Slick Rick, Delinquent Habits, and Coolio freely available on MTV in the days in which rap was still something of a counterculture movement, anti-sampling regulation and the influx of corporate money rendered the pop Hip Hop of the early 90’s a bland, uniformly mechanical musical landscape. In a way, this proved to be a blessing in disguise, as artists whose music fell somewhere outside the realm of marketable were forced to turn back to the techniques pioneered by their forebears (who were, in many cases, still active) to create their own artistic statements in overt defiance of the bland, whitewashed pop Hip Hop.
One group among the new breed, New Jersey’s Dälek, turned to the genre-blending, deliberately-harsh-sound-and-subject-matter techniques pioneered by East Coast rap legends Public Enemy for inspiration. From their debut release (1998’s Negro Necro Nekros EP) and the relentless touring schedule that followed it, through their breakthrough (2002’s From Filthy Tongue Of Gods And Griots) and further subsequent tours, the band developed a reputation for, to quote Chuck D, bringing the noise, merging Bomb Squad-esque sound collaging with overtly My Bloody Valentine-inspired walls of noise and breakbeats slowed to a sepulchral grind. While each of the band’s three (at the time) members handled production duties, much of the musical direction was governed by producer Alap “Oktopus” Momin; his obscure, manipulated-to-the-point-of-unrecognizability samples formed the low end-heavy backbone of the group’s sound. Anchoring the attack was ostensible frontman MC Dälek (whose pronunciation is closer to that of “dialect” than of the Dr. Who villains), spitting rhymes often at a low growl with a flow clearly descended from the likes of Gil Scott-Heron or Kurtis Blow. In 2004, the band released their second album for Ipecac Records, the label owned by indisputable rock god/former Faith No More and Mr. Bungle frontman Mike Patton. Absence, the first of the group’s albums to be recorded entirely after the September 11, 2001 attacks (Filthy Tongue was largely composed before them), finds the band buried in arrangements dark and threatening to the point of discomfort.
“Distorted Prose” begins with Dälek (the MC) spitting slightly more vicious invective than usual—whether his rage is directed at who he calls “a bastard child of Reaganomics posed in a B-Boy stance” or at the greater white American society-at-large is a matter of opinion. Dälek spits eight full bars before the music even begins, first with a sampled upright bass before exploding into a din of shrieks and thuds; the band seems to be aware of the weight of the oppressive noise, allowing the MC brief verses between bursts of feedback, before the song’s bridge, which unleashes the band’s third, unheralded member. DJ Still announces his presence by scratching in a spoken-word piece talking about the “war of survival [between] Pan-Africanism and white supremacy;” the intensity of the rhetoric amps up the song’s energy level tenfold even as Still’s precise cuts (arguably the most resonant example of scratching ever committed to record) emphasize the two opposing terms. “Distorted Prose” roars to its conclusion six minutes after it begins, with Oktopus slowing the beat to a halt as if stopping a record with his finger, leaving the listener slightly confused, paranoid, and more than a little angry–and it’s only the first song. The album continues with “Asylum (Permanent Underclass),” with Dälek hurling rage-filled bile at the majority’s power over American society (“what, now we equals ‘cause we have a King’s holiday?”) over Still’s surgically tight cuts. The group takes aim at the state of pop hip-hop with “Culture For Dollars,” with guest MC Oddateee joining the group on the chorus: “Who trades his culture for dollars/the fool or the scholar?”
From there, the album becomes an exercise in curveballs, beginning with the album’s title track, a minute-and-a-half-long ambient collage of wind-swept noises and organ touches, and continuing with “A Beast Caged,” an anti-death penalty screed highlighted by Still simultaneously mixing in vocal samples of both legendary civil rights figure Angela Davis and punk rock icon/free speech activist Jello Biafra. After “Koner” (another ambient exercise), “In Midst Of Struggle” and “Eyes To Form Shadows” form a two-song, fourteen-minute suite of aggressive noise. Wisely, lest the album collapse in on itself from its own anger and despair, “Ever Somber” pops up as the second-to-last track, with Dälek turning introspective, Still using more subtle cuts, and Oktopus bringing in the roaring guitar of Joshua Booth. At four minutes and fifty seconds, “Ever Somber” (the album’s lone single) is the shortest vocal track on the album, and the closest thing to a happy-sounding song the band has ever created, largely due to Booth (who appears sparingly at other points on the album as well). To eliminate all doubt as to Absence’s overall tone, however, the anti-religion song “Opiate The Masses” veers back into dark territory, sending the album out on a more familiar—if somewhat downcast—note.
Interestingly, Absence came out on the heels of another of the band’s releases–Derbe Respect, Alder, a collaborative effort with Krautrock pioneers Faust; perhaps predictably, they toured relentlessly on both albums worldwide. Unfortunately, the grueling schedule took its toll; Absence proved to be the band’s final album with Still, who released one solo album under the name before stepping out of the musical world for the remainder of the decade. [AUTHOR’S UPDATE: Still–née Hsi-Chang Lin–has returned to music under the name The Brutalist School.] Dälek and Oktopus released two more proper albums as a group—2007’s Abandoned Language (featuring a host of guest DJ’s) and 2009’s superb Gutter Tactics–before taking an indefinite hiatus from touring, opening their own Deadverse Studios, and joining separate projects IconAclass and MRC Riddims, respectively. Still, Absence is the group’s harrowing definitive statement, an album that hasn’t spoken to anywhere near as many people as it ought to have.
A. Darryl Moton is a freelance writer/Iowan/curmudgeon listening to Helms Alee in Portland, Oregon.
