It’s hard to deny the overall effect of this strange, smartly conceived album.
They take on a variety of voices, offering quick snapshots from various sectors of ghetto experience: “Black Rock” imagines street vagrants munching on early morning cheeseburgers, their jittery desperation echoed by galumphing piano and a hard-edged drumbeat; “The Dark (Trinity)” features frustrated corner boys getting soaked in the rain, their arrogance wilting as the spare, steady music grows increasingly mournful. All this gets echoed by the group’s live-band aesthetic, which pieces together revised versions of traditional soul instrumentation with spooky atonal strings and jagged samples, jumping from Nina Simone to Mary Lou Williams to Michel Chion, the patchwork structure conveying the feeling of a culture broken into pieces, exploiting those rifts to explore the full extent of hip-hop’s literary capabilities.