El-P - Cancer 4 Cure

I knew what this album review would be before i even finished ordering it: what's my album collection have to say about Brooklyn? 

Well, the Beastie Boys say we can't sleep 'til we get there and have a fight or possibly play baseball with 3rd Bass, you can dial a 900 number to hear They Might Be Giants songs, Biohazard says be careful walking to the subway 'cause you might get shot, or possibly undead if Type O Negative's posse of vampires gets to you first, and now El-P tells me there's drones flying everywhere. 

Google maps has some pictures of the pretty landmarks. It has its own bridge to Manhattan. Queens and the rest of Long Island to the east, where the Good Rats and Aesop Rock used to live. 

What i didn't know was how well it would culminate the random string of albums from the weekend. Too well, it turns out, but we're here to review an album not psychoanalyze myself. Turns out we'll hear El-P psychoanalyze himself, his occupation, and his city. My brain feels like the glass shards on the cover, i'm sure this will help. 

Calling this album cynically paranoid is putting it mildly, but it's an album about living through it, choosing to live through it, refusing to back down and hide from living through it, being the cancer for which death is the cure. With some bravado and dick jokes along the way, of course. 

As William S. Burroughs so succinctly puts it: this is war to extermination. 

All things must end, and these are stories about experiencing that end and living through it. 

The bird with a halo came from a drawing on a toy wooden airplane made by Alexander Calder (the drawing). Here it's recreated in glass shards. The album itself is dedicated to Camu Tao who died of lung cancer in 2008. Camu also influenced Aesop Rock's Impossible Kid, all three were good friends and bandmates. Cancer 4 Cure is the first album El-P made after putting his label Definitive Jux on hiatus (he stepped down as artistic director in 2010 and it's a tombstone in the UMG graveyard now). 

Musically speaking, this is deep dark electronic beatwork. Borderline jungle and rave, interstellar synth noise, strange samples, and bizarre live instruments. A paranoid sci-fi acid trip through the interstellar ghetto is what it sounds like. 

Storywise, there's some real doozies that you just have to hear for yourself, like Upstairs Neighbor and Tougher Colder Killer. It's a complicated album, but it boils down to choosing to consciously live it. 

No offense, but Brooklyn sounds terrifying, with or without the drone attack.