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Dalek - Gutter Tactics
| Tinymixtapes |
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Can I get a fucking hallejeujah? Again; hallejeujah? I normally don’t celebrate right out of the box when I review a hip-hop record, but it’s just been so long since I heard a rap unit master the art of the chorus the way Dälek do. Pop in enough records with dippy J5/Streets/etc. shout-a-longs and you’ll feel the same way, bristling when another low-rent wrappa tries to express the meaning of his/her songs with a mundane sentence or two. As a copy editor who is forced (often by weapons-wielding superiors) to encapsulate the point of a 20-inch story in four words or less, I find the majority of rappers’ repeated failure to summarize the gist of their work tidily to be a glaring gap. Dalek manage to keep their chants clean, thank christ, but their appeal goes far beyond their ability to NOT suck the life out of their jams with hairy choruses. Being a steadfast Dälek supporter since From Filthy Tongue of Gods and Griots, their debut album (Dälek are a group, despite the fact one member is also named Dälek; Jovi anyone?), I find it hard to find fault with their approach, which is same-y but laced with beats and rhymes so powerful they conjure the old ‘if it izain’t broke, don’t fixxit’ axiom....full text |
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| Allmusic |
| Coming off of the blistering beats and symphonic doom of Abandoned Language, New Jersey duo Dälek (pronounced dialect) continue swaggering down the same path that made their last album a success, and in a sense, Gutter Tactics could be considered Abandoned Language, Pt. 2. When you've found your sound, why make a departure? Previous tour dates with Ipecac labelmates -- Isis in particular -- prove to be hugely influential once again, as metallic fuzz and white-noise layers propel the agitated rhymes of dälek (the MC) in a thick swampy steam. Aptly titled, the album has a dark, disorienting, and toxic vibe. Instrumentally, Gutter Tactics shares much in common with the droning shoegaze of My Bloody Valentine and the distorted orchestration of Mono, due to live overdubs provided by various musicians ushered from dälek's Deadverse record label into his newly built studio. The funky jazz of Motiv is washed into a haze behind Destructo Swarmbots' myriad of guitar effects, resulting in a blurry ultra-compressed dreamscape wedged between the brick-breaking snaps of Oktopus' beats. It's actually quite difficult to specify what instrumentation makes up the wall of sound -- synths, strings, horns, guitar effects, or something else entirely. It all simply sounds like a sludgy cyclic hum that shifts between two moods: threatening and beautiful. On one side of the coin, there's the ominous "No Question," with factory crunch drum sequencing accented by intense Jeru the Damaja-type rhymes. On the other, there's the flashback to the sweeter days of hip-hop in the sedate and droning "We Lost Sight," a song that marks the MC and producer at the top of their game as chamber organs swell hypnotically underneath a gritty boom-bap, while dälek reminisces in a echoing vocal, "We lost sight on how to use these mikes/What scripts we write/How to choose our fights." Disenchantment with the state of rap, and society as a whole, is a major underlying theme, but the statements never feel too preachy or in your face. Instead, the vocal freestyles hover just slightly above the music, delivered in an amorphous mumble that matches the sonic abyss of the background perfectly. Headphones are highly recommended for this one....full text |
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| Popmatters |
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The hip-hop heads who follow the genre as closely as high rollers watch a horse race might have other ideas, but for my money Dälek (pronounced “DYE-a-leck") was responsible for the best—and most depressing—rap song of 2007. Over 10 minutes in length, the title track from Abandoned Language channeled a world of depravity in the muted wail comprising half of the song’s melody, looped and sustained into oblivion. What begins as “typical” hip-hop fare sprawls upward and outward as bricks pile atop others and the instruments steadily crush everything beneath them, but not before Okt0pus and Dälek (the MC after whom the duo is named) have their way with words. Amidst their scary, surrealistic street poetry, delivered in a low bark burning with steely resentment, one very direct line stands out: “Six-hundred years, ain’t a fucking thing different.” And then, just as this thought is allowed to sink in, the raps fragment and dissolve and the music picks up their slack, conveying in sounds what Dälek and Okt0pus cannot express in language. Taking the song’s trademark aphorism absolutely literally is missing the point. Of course society has progressed since the Middle Ages, but as for us as human beings, well, the story isn’t quite as flattering, is it? We’ve gathered from historical accounts, art, and literature that the roots of humankind grew from seeds of violence and vilification, neither of which has ever really gone away—only changed form. People still kill people. There’s still a palpable discrepancy between the haves and the have-nots. Narcissism powers the engines that drive many of us to our goals. Dälek have treated these judgments as mere observations in their decade-long career, throughout which they appeared to have only become angrier and more focused, as well as more lyrically concrete: who has time for alliteration when someone’s just been murdered on the corner of the block? The ingeniousness of the Dälek project, however, lies and may always lie in the overwhelming sheets of sound that throw the two staples of hip-hop (beats and rhymes) into the back seat when they’re simply not powerful enough to send the message. Stuffed with noise, mutilated by pedals and after-effects, and layered with instrumental drones both tempered and insane, the music is a poignant retranslation of their worldviews and a hell of a statement in itself—one that describes the gangs of Dälek’s home state of New Jersey as much as it does the ugly primordial soup out of which we arose well over 600 years ago....full text |
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