The Californian
experimental hip hoppers continue to push sonic boundaries on their supposedly final
album, but is it an explosive enough ending to make up for their unpredictable
and action-packed career?
When friends, family members and random elderly strangers in the
street ask me why I like Death Grips, my response is usually something
illogical and vague like ‘because they’re
nuts’. The truth is, I’m not entirely sure myself as to why I love Death
Grips. Their music is largely unmusical. Vocalist MC Ride sounds like a hobo
whose stubbed his toe and even with a lyric sheet, it’s hard to make out
whether he’s spurting out dense poetry or simply nonsense.
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| 'I'm epiphanic amnesia! I'm in Jimmy Page's castle! I'm off the planet!' - MC Ride |
In many ways, it is simply the mystery of not understanding
Death Grips that is the appeal – that and the fact that their raw aggression is
so primal and thrilling.
Last year, scrawled apathetically on the back of a napkin as
is their style, the band announced their breakup, stating: ‘We are now at our best and so Death Grips is
over’. Assuming it’s not just another publicity stunt, The Powers that B is the group’s final album.
Essentially it’s two records disguised as a double album.
The first half, N****s on the Moon,
was released before the band’s breakup and I rambled briefly about it on this
blog. Having listened to it a few times, I’ve grown to appreciate it. It’s the
band’s most proggy album yet, consisting of complex songs with changing time
signatures, interspersed with random chopped-up Bjork vocals. MC Ride’s voice meanwhile
is at its most clearest, whilst his lyrics are some of his most impenetrable: ‘melanin pewter cellophane/ arms as long as
their legs/ even the greys can’t/ voila’.
The second part of The
Powers that B was released a couple weeks ago and is titled Jenny Death. Unlike its counterpart,
there’s less progginess, less word salad and less chopped-up Bjork vocals. In
fact, the glitchy Bjork vocals have been traded in completely for a new motif – guitars. Many of
the songs contain distorted hardcore punk riffs – namely ‘Turned Off’ and ‘Why a
Bitch Got A Lie’. Whilst N****s on the
Moon is the band’s proggiest release, Jenny
Death can be viewed as their most punky.
Prog and punk are essentially ying and yang musically – one celebrating
depth and complexity, the other celebrating rawness and simplicity.
Consequently, the two halves of The
Powers That B don’t feel very cohesive as a whole. Maybe it was Death Grips’
intention to show how schizophrenic they can be stylistically. Personally, I
feel I’m tempted to listen to one at a time rather than both as a whole,
suggesting they should be two separate albums.
The album is certainly their most extreme work to date by all definitions of the word, which is
something Death Grips have always tried to achieve with each release and hence
would imply that this is a suitable finale to their career. The title track,
‘The Powers that B’, is their loudest and most abrasive banger since the opener
to Government Plates. ‘On GP’ meanwhile is their most depressive,
containing some explicitly suicidal lyrics and ending rather powerfully on the
line: ‘I’d be a liar if I sat here
claiming I’d exit in a minute/ but I can’t say I wouldn’t have my limits.’.
This itself is a heavy statement to end the band’s career on, and is further explored
in the closing instrumental proceeding it entitled ‘Death Grips 2.0’. This
closing track is the group’s fastest and most sinister sounding track so far
and the ‘2.0’ in the title helps to end the album with an air of mystery – are
Death Grips going to one day reform as more advanced version of themselves? Or
have they reached their ‘limits’.
Most of these standout moments happen in the second half, Jenny Death, which leaves the first
half, N****s on the Moon, feeling a
bit redundant as part of the climax. That being said, the first half is still
enjoyable and flows better than Jenny
Death. The topic of sex is also explored more deeply on N****s on the Moon than any previous
release, with tracks like ‘Fuck me out’ and the hilariously titled ‘Have a Sad Cum’ painting it as a
depressive subject. It has always been Death Grips mission to turn hip hop clichés
on their head, and this itself seems like an attack on sexual braggadocio.
Arguably, Jenny Death contains the
most blatant example – ‘Pss Pss’ being a charming trap-flavoured number about
pissing on a girl’s face.
Overall, The Powers
That B succeeds at doing what all Death Grips albums have done before it –
it raises more questions than answers. Death Grips could never give us an
explosive ending as this would require destroying the air of mystery that is so
essential to their appeal. They’d have to reveal some major plot twist – ‘Death
Grips were One Direction in disguise all along’ or something along those lines.
Sadly, I don’t think the band have anything nearly as impressive to reveal, no
dark hidden secrets, no grand plot to overthrow the music industry. However, I
do believe there is more to their music than simply spontaneous noise for the
sake of being noisy, and the desire to decipher this is what makes Death Grips so engaging.
★★★★☆
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