Anti-Pop Consortium – Fluorescent Black

A futuristic blueprint...

You know ‘Boom Boom Pow’ by the Black Eyed Peas? That risible fidget of gobbledygook which looked so pleased with itself atop the charts earlier this year? Well blame Anti Pop Consortium. It was their fault… The twats.

But in all honesty blaming Anti Pop Consortium for Fergie’s verbal genocide is akin to tracing the obliteration of Hiroshima back to Ernest Rutherford. Just because someone can lay originators’ claim to a sound does not confer responsibility for all those dickwads who follow on and appropriate it for their own anaemic hip-pop shambles.

First appearing back in 2000, Anti Pop Consortium initially seemed like an earnest experiment masterminded by a bunch of musos; wherein rap was wrestled from the commercial ennui of Nelly and Eminem and returned to its rightful place on the experimental fringes. A quixotic clammer of electronica and batshit rhymes, APC went on to release a clutch of EPs and albums – peaking with 2002’s blistering ‘Arrhythmia’. Splitting shortly after, it seemed for a while that the very group who had evolved the Electro strain of Egyptian Lover and Man Parish into the chart-primed pseudovector that permitted Kanye’s dalliances with Daft Punk and Timberlake’s fizzy pop, had flat-lined prematurely thereby denying us their purple patch.

But now it’s 2009 and they’re back shitting the bed with complex rhymes, binary bleached production and an LP of fucking great tunes. Opening ‘Fluorescent Black’ through an unholy squall of guitars on ‘Lay Me Down’, initial fears that APC have sought to reclaim their blip-hop throne by razing avant-hell on the listener are soon expunged when a meaty rhythm and corrugated wordplay put the door through.

Vocally dextrous and founded on an intimate understanding of their differing strengths, Beans, M. Sayyid, Earl Blaize and High Priest deliver seventeen tracks so sharp it’ll paper cut your ears. Ranging from the pop monochrome of ‘Get Life’ and ‘Born Electric’’s neon soul, through to the Clio-wrecking banger ‘New Jack Exterminator’ and inside out maelstrom of ‘Dragunov’, Anti Pop Consortium have once again issued a futuristic blueprint that will subtly define the coming decade’s urban landscape.

Back to black!

8/10

Words by Adam Park

Read ClashMusic’s interview with Anti-Pop Consortium HERE.

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