Infinity Knives & Brian Ennals – A City Drowned in God’s Black Tears

The calling card of the experimental hip hop duo Infinity Knives and Brian Ennals is what are effectively spoken-word political screeds accompanied by crunchy and spacey beats which might call to mind Def Jux records from the early aughties in atmosphere and temperament. So the caustic opener ‘The Iron Wall’ featuring FRANKI3 serves as a scathingly blunt attack on Benjamin Netanyahu, the state of Israel and the United States for their collective role in the destruction of Gaza, while closer to home the second track ‘Live at the Chinese Buffett’ begins ‘The bitch that got Emmett Till killed just died and I pray that it was painful as fuck’.

‘Zionists are the new Nazis, Netanyahu is the new Hitler’ the rapper Ennals asserts on ‘The Iron Wall’ making his case by way of the Israeli military’s penchant for slaughtering children and shooting up aid trucks, while with a degree of ribaldry and revelry and his own knack for thumbing the eye of perceived antagonists and oppressors the likes of Gal Gadot and Elon Musk also catch a few strays from the staticky charge of his microphone.

Yet that wilful and at times gleeful antagonism – a product of breaking through the guardrails, bucking convention and simply saying it as he sees it – also extends to more conflicted targets who might continue to garner support within wider hip hop culture, as later in ‘Live at the Chinese Buffett’ the rapper curtly states and ponders ‘Bambaataa was a pedophile, Russell was a rapist, so how far can hip hop really take us?’ while the opening line on ‘BAGGY’ invokes karma by suggesting ‘Kobe Bryant was a rapist and he paid for that’. So together Ennals and the producer Infinity Knives are not afraid of probing and even possibly alienating prospective members of their audience.

Following up on their acclaimed 2022 record King Cobra, for A City Drowned in God’s Black Tears the Baltimore duo battled the death of close friends, their own faltering mental health and the loss of critical sound files which forced them to painstakingly recreate their first thrusts at the album, which was originally conceived as an extended play. FRANKI3 became keenly involved in the sound design and mixing of the record, designing and building many of the Eurorack modules used on the final product and dabbling in unconventional microphone placements with her work adding to the drama and immediacy as well as the scabrous textural density of the album.

Still on A City Drowned in God’s Black Tears the duo prove agnostic if not quite ambivalent when it comes to genre, so beyond the rap tectonics ‘A City Drowning. God’s Black Tears’ for instance features a Spanish-style fingerpicked guitar melody which burbles beneath choral vocals cut adrift somewhere between Hawaii and the Old West. The fabulistic tale introduces the Lil’ Black Oxen, a roving band of musicians and vocalists represented here by the tenor of Émile Joseph Weeks while the track also foregrounds the classically trained baritone voice of Nicolas Ratany Randrianarivelo as their sloshing chorales enhance the folk theme. Beyond the popular tradition, here the style bears comparison with the sun-kissed harmonies of Daniel Lentz or Michael Gordon’s suite A Western a recording of which was released within the past few weeks. Then in the final third of the composition, ‘A City Drowning. God’s Black Tears’ shifts into a piece of lurching black metal or blackgaze in the manner of Deafheaven.

‘Soft Pack Shorty’ featuring Eze Jackson and Dale Rath opens with a lilting repetition of the lines ‘I’ve got a girlfriend and she’s from the city. I know I love her, I think she is pretty’ before falling into a trap beat, and ‘Тревога/Trevoga’ boasts a smooth vocal by Vladlena Volodkevich over drums, bass and arpeggiated keys with the effect somehow akin to city pop or a J-pop soundtrack to a piece of classic anime.

Infinity Knives interpolates the sloshing opener and title track ‘Three Waves’ from the folk balladeer Dan Hanrahan’s newly reissued album on ‘Sometimes, Papi Chulo’ as cymbals, shakers and pan percussion add crashing emphasis to a dancehall rhythm while ‘Everyone I Love is Depressed’ tackles Bobby Brown, benders and new jack swing. Now eschewing the political bent of the earlier tracks for more wistful and fatalistic themes, ‘Two Headed Buffalo’ another lengthier piece which serves as a second-side counterpart to ‘A City Drowning’ echoes the sentiment ‘everything dies’ over strummed guitar and communal freak folk choruses before burbling out into space.

None of this sounds ill considered or half-baked, with the sheer gutsiness and pliability of their experimentalism staying true to any given mission statement as the live ‘Foggy’ and sixties siren song ‘O Trouble’ featuring Allison Clenandiel conclude A City Drowned in God’s Black Tears, with Infinity Knives and Brian Ennals ceding to the doo-wop atmospherics and slipping into the sunken arms of a chanteuse.