Barrelling out of the gates on ‘The World Is Dog’ with the snapping bark of a canine but a gruffer palate, the Armand Hammer rapper Elucid sets forth his most sonically diverse record to date, where hyperventilating sirens, ping-ponging kicks and claves plus the odd reggae undercurrent are provided by producers like Jon Nellen, August Fanon, Child Actor, the Iranian-Canadian siblings who make up Saint Abdullah and the 700 Bliss partner DJ Haram while Mekala Session and Luke Stewart add scabrous live drums and bass, the latter a David Murray Quartet and Irreversible Entanglements member who recently waded through Unknown Rivers with his formidable Silt Trio.
Railing against power dynamics which his art would subtly shift, and relaying both personal travails and doomsday scenarios as the tracks increasingly navigate science fiction terrains and crackling cinema soundscapes, his poetry is like barbed wire as each moment and each headspace seems to snag on the next stacked image.
On pieces like ‘Voice 2 Skull’ and the standout ‘Ikebana’ which is named after the Japanese art of flower arrangement, he describes daily itineraries which are burdened with unanswered questions and the blinding gaze of another sunrise on the way. Yet on ‘Bad Pollen’ with billy woods the duo broach the tenacity of parenthood and moments of marital intimacy while on ‘Huspuppies’ the narrator breathlessly strives to fulfil the Friday ritual of fried fish, finding succour as well as a sense of purpose in everyday family life, on a record which plows through the murk to come out hopeful or at least still broadly intact if not quite smelling of roses.
Referencing the psychedelic Beatles, Walt Whitman and Prince, on ‘In the Shadow Of If’ he takes an ecological bent and on ‘14.4’ he reminisces, as Elucid is joined by Skech185 to relay formative experiences prefaced all the way back in 1999 by the launch of Napster. Meanwhile over the whopping blades and skittering drums of ‘Slum of a Disregard’ his caustic and doleful baritone condemns a bad landlord, with Elucid portraying such negligence as an act of wilful abuse and a product of systemic asymmetry as he repeats the lines ‘Black mould, black lung, black child, no callback’, before the album closer ‘Zigzagzig’ assails those manmade clouds of war which continue to wreak their destruction on Gaza.
