Cadence Weapon, 'Afterparty Babies'
Source: (Upper Class Recordings)
Posted: 03/03/08 11:45AM
Filed Under: Music
Forget coasts or scenes; rap stars now come in tiny, isolated clusters, like Lil Wayne or the Clipse.
You can try to understand Edmonton-born Rollie Pemberton’s second album in terms of underground vs mainstream, but while it’s technically the former — with beats that are more swarms of buzzing synths with orphaned snatches of melody, and Cadence Weapon’s dense clusters of references to everything from Slick Rick to Cheers’ George Wendt (not to mention the lack of gun talk) — categories still don’t help.
With cuts like “Juliann Wilding” or “The New Face of Fashion,” detail-rich descriptions of coke parties and neon club nights that swing through and obliterate their shallow denizens like wrecking balls, you have to just keep listening to them until you’ve deciphered their lyrics and the beats sound catchy instead of hazy and abstract. Nothing in (or out of) hip-hop sounds as alien as Afterparty Babies’ clattering drum-machine percussion, programmed to sound like a cross between house and De La Soul (“In Search Of The Youth Crew”), and that can be off-putting at first.
But when you realize Cadence doesn’t really have any peers as a beatmaker or a lyricist, that foreignness becomes an asset. And for a guy who can rhyme this well in an era where individuality is hip-hop’s only hope, being a bit of a weirdo can’t hurt.
-Dave Morris
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