Dalek - Abandoned Language (Ipecac)
4/5
By: Thomas Hannan
Dalek know hip hop, they know rap, they know noise and they know avant garde experimental ambient music. They do all of these things simultaneously, at times sounding like listening to Merzbow in one earphone and Erik B and Rakim in the other, but pigeonholing them is far more difficult than that. It's a thankless, fruitless, pointless task. They're not a rap band, they're not a noise band. They're a great band, let's settle at that.
I refuse to believe that this is just music made by stoned people to listen to whilst getting stoned. It just seems far more dense than that, far more considered, far more subtle than your common drug record. You could write a thesis on these beats, these rhymes, these enormous swathes of clamorous sound that sit atop everything, like a fog you'll keep trying to penetrate in order to hear what the true worth of the record is. Clue - you'll never get beyond that fog to its core. The fog is the core.
Calling it 'Abandoned Language' is misleading, as although Dalek have eschewed many traditions of both the noise and hip hop scenes that have birthed them, this is still a very wordy album, highly eloquent and possessive of many thought provoking things to say. They've not abandoned language at all, they've just shrouded it in a cloak of mystic sonic smoke, meaning that the kind of audience they get will always be the one they want - the kind of listener who's willing to give a record time, who's willing to discover new things with every spin.
Preaching to the converted? Probably. But if you've been finding noise too cold of late and your hip hop love has been dwindling, you need this record to reinstate your love of both. Purveyors of both crafts can take many lessons from this - how to let go of your ego, how to inject your noise with some kind of humanity without making it any less confrontational ('Corrupt [Knuckle Up]' in actual fact being one of the most in your face pieces of music thus far in '07). The noise is remarkably well constructed. It can either be like fingers down a chalkboard or a billion orchestras all playing a different note at once ('Lynch'), but it's so, so well put together it's disarming.
It's odd to hear such a soothing voice telling you such unnerving things. It's the only thing you'll be able to latch on to on the whole record, as there are no discernable riffs, hooks or chord patterns the whole way through (only 'Paragraphs Relentless' comes anywhere near that) - the arrangements are huge, but the structures are very sparse - but be careful not to get too close unless you want Dalek to tell you things about the world that you might prefer not to know (i.e. that it's pretty f**ked - but if you didn't know that already, we want some of what you're on, please...). Your search for something catchy even has you claiming that the twisted brass parps which sound as if they're being played on saxophones that have just been run over by trucks on 'Stagnant Waters' are catchy. But they aren't. By trying to claim that however, you've proved that you're enough in to this record, you're accustomed to what it's trying to do - and when you've reached that stage, the battle has been won. And not by you. Dalek own you.
It's totally heavy going, but you probably knew that before you even pressed play, so to criticise it for delivering so well on its one real purpose - to be a complete chore, albeit a rewarding one, of a record - seems a little foolish. It's all of one pace, it's all otherworldly noise, it's relentlessly miserable, but it alters your mood in ways that few other records in your collection could dream to.
Stream two tracks from 'Abandoned Language' HERE.
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