Anti-Pop Consortium - Fluorescent Black

Rating

: * * * *

Verdict

:

Back to the future for reunited hip-hop innovators.

Few hip-hop collectives can create the kind of percussive, ambitious and resolute style of music that New York quartet Anti-Pop Consortium come up with. But apart from the squally opening guitar freak-out on the first track of

Fluorescent Black

, which is APC's reunion album after they split up in 2002 over creative differences, they come across mostly swingin', soulful and even poppy.

Still, it's not your typical loping and posturing hip-hop. APC's music is all about renegade rhythms, puncturing beats, with stinging lyrics, like "decibel deviant", "the rose in the garbage pail of rap", and, cheesy but best of all, "if murdering MCs was a disease I'd be contagious".

So on the punishing side there's the earthquake inducing

End Game

, with its haphazard, depth-plumbing beats, the jitter and scratch of

New Jack Exterminator

and the out of kilter minimalism of

Timpani

.

On the pop-tinged side there's the cosmic George Clinton-weirdness of

Volcano

(it'll have you singing along in no time), the sloping robotic funk of

The Solution

(be warned: vocoder in use) and album highlight

Born Electric,

which starts out like Bruce Hornsby and the Range, but then morphs into a breathless and clattery electro hip-hop dancefloor tune.

This is beyond hip-hop, this is music for now, and a futuristic force.

Scott Kara