El-P: Fantastic Damage

The career of Company Flow mastermind El-P serves as a sharp counterpoint to the rise and fall of Rawkus Records, the label that released the group's full-length debut, Funcrusher Plus. That album earned the group a fervent cult following while helping establish Rawkus' artistic legitimacy, but its abrasive, radio-unfriendly sound made its commercial prospects seem limited at best. Company Flow boasted a fraction of the mainstream appeal of labelmates Mos Def and Pharoahe Monch, but while Rawkus struggled to find an identity following its initial success, El-P quietly developed a reputation as one of rap's most fearless innovators. Company Flow eventually broke up, but by that time, El-P had already built his Definitive Jux label (home to such cultishly adored acts as Aesop Rock and Cannibal Ox) into an indie-rap powerhouse commanding the sort of respect and admiration Rawkus had once received. Definitive Jux's highest-profile release to date, El-P's Fantastic Damage finds beauty in ugliness and builds elaborate soundscapes out of artfully constructed noise. The sonic progeny of Dr. Octagon and Public Enemy, El-P's dirty, atmospheric sound collages take standard hip-hop tools—sampling, scratching, rapping—and use them in revolutionary ways. On "Tuned Mass Damper," for example, he takes a snippet of Kool G. Rap growling "You're not promised tomorrow" and transforms it from everyday B-boy fatalism into a bleak mantra delivered from a post-apocalyptic wasteland. In El-P's hands, nothing is safe or predictable: "Squeegee Man Shooting" even imbues the childhood nostalgia song, long a comforting hip-hop cliché, with an edge of menace and uncertainty. Not since Hank Shocklee and company led Chuck D through the Terrordome has a producer made such canny use of noise as El-P does here, but his gifts as a lyricist nearly match his skills as a producer. Splitting the difference between Kool Keith and Chuck D, he strings together seemingly artless but deceptively sharp and evocative stream-of-consciousness rants that resonate with authority. In a cheeky nod to his dystopian literary forefathers, El-P at one point references the key line in 1984 about the future consisting of a human face being stomped for eternity. Dark, foreboding, feel-bad music, Fantastic Damage sounds like the musical culmination of Orwell's warning. It's a mark of El-P's genius that he makes such a bleak B-boy apocalypse seem every bit as liberating as it is harrowing.