Dalek

It's 2005, and seven years have passed since Dälek first appeared on the US hip-hop scene, proving there was a way out of the sloppiness plaguing a genre that had merged too quickly with the crudest star-system, risking suffocation in the process. After the first two massive waves of tough, angry MCs and beatmakers, more than a little of that energy starts to falter, and it becomes increasingly hard to find crews worth their salt, ones that haven't lost sight of that genuine grit coming from the ghetto, that sincere storytelling, with social - and often political - implications. Will Brooks, aka Mc Dälek, is angrier than ever about how this filthy world works, while New York keeps rotting like a bad apple, and up at the highest levels the powers that be keep waging war on distant peoples, sometimes just by pressing a button from a comfortable command post thousands of miles from the target.

An embarrassing pre-crisis, post-9/11 political and social climate, one that stirs torment and real unease in the souls of Brooks and his bandmates. By this point, Dälek had already proven their devastating power with "Negro Necro Nekros", their debut album released on Gern Blandsten in October 1998, and above all with "From Filthy Tongues Of Gods And Griots", their second record, out in 2002, which shows the first delicious mutations, with the addition to the line-up of Dj Still, a supremely skilled scratcher from the New York scene, and even more dynamite fed into Oktopus's beats, who piles pattern upon pattern, distorting everything and its opposite while Brooks squares off against the world and its deviations, spitting incendiary rhymes like a horny dragon. But that's not enough. The voltage has to be cranked up further, proving their sonic ars bellica by stringing together swarms of feedback worthy of the most distorted shoegazers, buckets of indecipherable samples and skin-crawling electro-noise pulsations. After all, with Dälek on the mic, Still on the turntables and Oktopus on production, all that's left to do is put on camo gear with Gerald Holtom's logo instead of the US Army's, and unleash all the rage in your body.

In the tracks of "Absence", there's something for everyone. Brooks takes aim at the powers that be, or as old Mickey from Rocky would put it: Will "eats lightning and craps thunder". It's a storm of fury, propelled by a sonic tsunami that surges forward, dragging along everything in its path. The opening "Distorted Prose" is a statement of intent, as if Einstürzende Neubauten were accompanying Public Enemy into the ring for the final showdown:

Distorted poet, speak prose

Incite our peoples

We got raked over coals

But the truth’s still untold

Meaning lost to these zealots

Prefer bullets to ballots

Watch the rich sip from chalice

As these eyes fill with malice

Peasant hands remain callous

As our days retain darkness

I swallow razor blades to keep my vocal cords sharpened

An exquisitely old-skool approach, sudden jazzy fascinations and shattered turntablism: these are the ingredients of the following “Asylum (Permanent Underclass)”, before noise-drenched escapes introduce and sustain the epochal stride of “Culture For Dollars”, one of the cornerstones of the Dälek canon, ahead of the chaotic, infernal “A Beast Caged”, yet another essay in sonic depravity applied to the deepest rage, all laced with dark, carpet-like veins that further amplify a wall of sound that grows ever more unique and unmistakable, between noise pirouettes and anxiolytic ravings that alternate with furious, deviant in-your-face rapping. The cascades of noise that close out most movements exist solely to deliver the effective detonation downstream of the explosive charge genuinely set upstream.

A sense of bewilderment and indignation winds its way from one piece to the next, between a degenerate beat and a verse as contorted as it is incendiary. The instrumental “Koner” is a subdued descent into the underworld. A Dantesque flight through the circles of hell, before firing the engines back up and climbing back toward the light, engaging in a new battle against the demons of the most rampant capitalism and the most corrupt politics (“In Midst Of Struggle”). A fight to be waged with the revolution of the forefathers in one's heart (Malcolm X above all), and with poetry that is both anguished and equally defiant:

Severed windpipes often cause empires to fall

Calm as angel they’d announce heir to bludgeoned throne

Violent seeds constantly resown

Arsenic laced climate awaits spark to implode

Floodlights shone into tired eyes since youth

Poems honed now retaliate with truth

I seen gods lose honor with each word they chose

The battle against the demons of Western society continues undeterred on the tormented “Eyes to Form Shadows”, a track with a more accessible flow, certainly the least possessed of the bunch. The triumphant mood of the following “Ever Somber” shows an unexpected emphasis, with a softer beat and an almost gentle melody at times, as if it were harboring a faint hope for the future. The lesson of forefathers Run DMC is fully absorbed and pushed onto abrasive terrain on the closing “Opiate The Masses”, propped up as it is by sudden stop&go breaks, whose murderous restarts amid cascades of riffs and assorted debris add lava to an already extremely disturbed climax.

After “Absence” came the excellent “Abandoned Language” and “Gutter Tactics”, along with gaps as long as seven years, such as the one between “Untitled” and “Asphalt For Eden”. And yet no other Dälek record, and no other hip-hop band, would ever manage to recreate that same alchemy. A work in which unease, upheaval and fury crash together at the very same point, generating a roar unrepeated in history. Dälek's all-out political invective and the shocking musical force that accompanies it remain a vivid example for entire generations of angry rappers who are, at the same time, firmly inclined toward intriguing new stylistic fusions.

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21/04/2019