The seventh album by the Detroit experimental, eclectic hip-hop and hyper-pop artist pushes the envelope with some extraordinary, dynamic sounds, dance music with warp-speed, slick rapping and multiple guests through an invented “90s-era pop star” persona called Dusty Star. Brown is unpredictable and chaotic in his presentation, but this is a new era for him, declaring sober and post-rehab, but his inventiveness seems un-dimed and benefits from new focus. Opener Book of Daniel, backed colourful guitar strums and breaking drums in an epic rock style, is something of a candid mantra, namechecking some of his favourite artists, including Kendrick Lamar, describing his rehab journey: “Everything I went through had me drowning on the surface / Discovered who I am, now I know my life purpose/ So it was all worth it, now just pay me mind/ I put my lifetime in between the paper lines / Every album is a chapter, when I die that's life after.” But the it is Stardust that instantly jumps out like some musical alien landing, with rippling, squealing sounds and oddball synths starkly accompanying his high fast rapping filled with rich cross-reference: “Present is the past in a second so count your blessings / The lesson in the essence that snatch you out adolescence / They woke me up inside like listen to Evanescence” before changing pace into a staccato, glass-shard dance music of distortion and in two typical lines, referencing Brave New World and Winona Ryder’s notorious moment of retail kleptomania: “I reign like Tacoma, they sleepin' like they on Soma (Uh) /So when I get up on 'em, I'm stealin' shit like Winona”, before a third section narrated by guest Angel Emoji: “You clocked that which you'd never see / The minutiae of the world's beauty.” Copycats (featuring Underscores) is perhaps the album’s catchiest, wriggliest and rhythmical fusion hip-hop and pop in which Brown extemporises on this album’s persona. 1999 (with a screaming death metal JOHNNASCUS) feels like a super-itchy video game electronica track of insanely speedy pace explained as a virtual white-knuckle ride reality: “Think the whole world just ended in 1999 (Style). Got us trapped in that matrix and everybody died / It's a simulation, it ain't real and think somebody lied / Now we glitchin', no fixin', and we are dead inside.” And so the album continues at a breathtaking pace of lyrical flow and pop and dance music experimentation using sounds from 1990s dance music and club sounds such as Flowers (with 8485), the catchy bounce of Lift You Up, the machine gun rhythm of Baby, all the way to the ambient and drum’n’bassy The End and All4You. The first half of the album is stronger, but the second is has no shortage of surprises and jumps, including a rap and vocal from Polish indie-pop artist ta Ukrainka alongside Quadeca and Cynthonia. Mind-bendingly inventive and restless, Brown continues to amaze, antagonise and entertain at a hyperactive pace. Out on Warp Records.
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