Alias The other side of the looking-glass LP
This meaty broth filled with mushroom-inspired lyrics and spicy beats is definitely not party music – that’s unless to you “party” means being alone in a scented candle-lit room with only this album and a bottle of malt to keep you company till dawn. True, Alias doesn’t have the most distinct voice and true, if there was to be a Mr Men movie, his repertoire of terse prose-poetry over haunting industrial rhythms would make him an unlikely casting for Mr Happy. However, as this reclusive character emerges from the shadows cast by the other more charismatic three quarters of Deep Puddle Dynamics,Alias’s impressive debut album succeeds to pull Anticon’s reputation back from the precipice on which it’s been Careening for far too long.
This is an album of gargantuan tracks featuring stark, overwhelming drum programming. The album’s beats are built from individual Bass kicks, cymbal crashes and snare hits of such formidable immensity that they probably each have their own atmosphere and geotropic satellites. The album’s first lyrics (“concentrate on this wave of sound with the grace of falling towers, overpower each percussion hit with a split of personality.!”) encapsulate how going up against these beats is serious business; like playing football with asteroids. The most obvious manifestation of the album’s title is Opus Ashamed where, over a metallic didgeridoo-like drone, Alias plays split personality mirror-buddies with Dose One. As they go back and forth echoing each others’ machine-gun vocal stylings, Alias surprisingly comes off sounding more dynamic and rounded than his normally show-stealing crewmate. The instrumentals tend to be terrific and awesome but when these fierce drumbeats are mixed with dreamy piano and woodwind melodies, tracks become gentle giants as likely to caress as crush those in their grip. Speaking of teetering on a “precipice,” Alias’s sparse drum & bass production captures that same exhilarating sensation experienced by those taking their first step back off of a mountain ledge to see if the absailing rope holds or leaping off that bridge and waiting for the bungee to recoil. For instance, once Alias steps off into the unknown of Angel of Solitude the track’s huge crash cymbal sounds like a life-saving parachute opening and unravelling so that this free-verse free-faller can gently swoop down through plush piano drones.
This is, without doubt, the most disconsolate hiphop album so far released in 2002. The only way this record could become more depressive is if Alias was to close the first track by sticking a pistol in his mouth, pull the trigger and handing mic duties to Nelly. He may well be upholding the Anticon tradition of morbid introspection and he does arguably take introspection to new dark depths. However unlike most Anticon output of the past year which found them blaming their cognitive dissonance on everyone else and claiming that their misery stems from being ahead of their time, Alias looks within for resolution. I have read accounts of fighter pilots who describe how the half-second between their ejection-chair working and their plane exploding seems like an eternity and everyone has lived through incidents which appeared to play out in slow motion. Well, Alias uses his debut album to establish his own bubble of slowed-down time in which to ask “-Wh-y?..” and use the clarity he has acquired from having reached rock-bottom to eventually answer his own question. As Alias sinks down through “the bottomless abyss of bi-polar disorders,” continually dodging a jagged coral of extreme tinny and bass drum noises on the way during Getting By (Version 2), It is often as if Alias has become so engrossed by his own morbid fascinations that he attains some sort of transcendental dissolution of self outside of time. Having established some kind of bubble or cerebral crawl-space, Alias delivers an album of frank self-analysis that does go somewhere. In fact, the album traces not one, not two but three different routes.
The first mytheme exploits the phrase “the other side of the looking glass” as a metaphor used To describe the stumbling upon a hither too covered fact which in turn unearths the existence of some global conspiracy. This is best demonstrated by the cynic’s manifesto Jovial Costume during which, over a severe hail of hi hat and snare rhythms, Alias lets rip with a fidgety existentialist monologue. The chorus is unambiguous with it’s straight-forward “Please pass the ‘how are yous’ I’m trying to prove a point to the walking dead, and use my songs as smelling salts to get inside your head!” However, as Alias flits from subject to subject, in and out of rhyme, the track makes for the sort of monologue which would make the characters of any Samuel Beckett play say “whoa dude! Why so restive? Take a chill pill…One thought at a time….” Another track concerned with ideas of conspiracies is pill hiding. This shape-shifting track Starts off with alias aping the usual rhyme-driven “entwine with your spine” stock rap lyrics but he soon topples this apple-cart with his refusal to swallow the bullshit conformity that keeps “the upper-middle management happy.”
The second mytheme of this project synthesises the Lewis Carroll connotations of the title and the transformative properties traditionally attributed to water in order to harness misery as metamorphosis and to transport the listener into a strange new world. A standout track on both this album and the previously released Anticon Giga Single is the monody Watching water.
This elegiac piece finds Alias’s echoing contemplation refracted through a dreamy piano pattern and heavy drum beat. The sombre mood is intended to evoke images of rainy days spent looking out the window and tracing the random paths of water droplets which parallel the chaos of life. the faint maternal mutterings at the beginning of Black Tea find retrospection morphing into regression, prompting Alias to crawl into a surrogate womb from which he delivers a lecture about Lacanian ideas of symbolism, art and the formation of individual identity through expression. The female voice muffle at the top of the track becomes evermore audible until it is possible to hear her thoughts on death and resurrection.
The third and governing theme of the project which receives the most thorough attention from Alias is how he and his music have, for some time now, been used and abused as a mirror onto which fanatics and critics have projected aspects of themselves. Now it’s time for the mirror to talk back and for the world to hear what this mirror actually thinks about it all. As he floats on a hypnotic swirl of flute and hand percussion patterns, Arrival finds Alias deconstructing the motives behind performance and criticism. He considers how, whereas he can understand and appreciate his and his fellow artists’ compulsion to perform and create, he cannot understand why other people criticise and dissect, especially when it makes them so unhappy. As he observes all these wretched people stroking their chins and taking their frustrations out on him, he suggests that people try paddling their own canoe and stop worrying about how other people are navigating the river. The autobiographical Inspirations Passing starts with a mother figure reciting the five-little piggies nursery rhyme and then Alias goes on to say how he and his siblings owe their creativity and love of performing to their late mother. The organ-driven track is topped off with a simple yet effective pentatonic saxophone solo by twelve year old Ehren Whitney These three often overlapping strands of the project finally unite with the punkrock thrust of “Final Act” where Alias throws his lifework into the mosh pit. This raucous track sounds nothing like anything which has preceeded it and yet is the perfect way to round out the album.
- Sumo Kaplunk | profile
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