Send "Themselves " Ringtones to your Cell 
| Pitchfork |
 My elementary school teacher told my class that he believed you were granted a certain number of words in your life, and once you've said them all, you die. (Yeah, in elementary school-- he was a pretty weird dude.) The fact that Doseone is still sucking air contradicts his theory. The motor-mouthed rapper would have used up any reasonable allotment after Themselves' 1999 debut, Them, and he's continued to vent his glossomania with Subtle, cLOUDDEAD, 13 & God, and other projects over the ensuing decade. But maybe my teacher was right, and this is just a "deal with the devil" situation, where Dose traded any prospect of mainstream success for a bottomless bag of language, an unmistakable nasal whine to distinguish his voice, and an unnatural capacity for rapid-fire enunciation.Dose was a founding member of experimental hip-hop collective Anticon, and like many of his peers, his relationship to rap has grown more abstract over the years. Them was a very strange record, with tweaky, minimal beats (by the other half of Themselves, Jel) that showcased Dose's verbal arsenal: rhymes so tightly clustered that "internal" doesn't do them justice; protean timbres and cadences; sound effects, whispers, giggles, funny accents. But for all of its spoken-wordy set pieces and surreal imagery, it was undeniably a rap record, rooted in rhymes-and-breaks fundamentals. The same cannot be said of much work by Dose's other groups, where sung vocals, electro-pop, and post-rock have at least as much traction as hip-hop....full text |
| Dustedmagazine |
| Doseone, the rapping half of Themselves, has won respect for confronting basic assumptions about what hip hop is and can be. To his credit, he and his Anticon cohort have shown how hip hop can be melded to rock in ways that aren’t stodgy Rick Rubin iterations or Girl Talk kitsch, and have revealed that the sound’s seeming foundations – such as, ahem, rhyming on beat – can be chucked like loose topsoil. But although he deserves some praise for his efforts, Doseone has gotten by for too long on the mere fact that he’s challenging. Difficulty shouldn’t be a virtue in itself. And the new Themselves’s album, CrownsDown, is an opportunity to reconsider whether Doseone’s abstruseness is really something of merit. CrownsDown is Themselves’s third record, but the first that the team of Doseone and Jel has released since 2002. Again, the duo pit gonzo against glitch – Doseone raps for minutes on end in a mishmash of bizarre characters and little structure, while Jel amps up the distortion on his jolted beats. Jel’s production is, despite the noisiness, fairly conventional – reset the equalizers, and you’d have something that sounds like today’s club tracks. (Check the Auto-Tune on “You Ain’t It.”) Doseone’s accelerated ramblings are another matter. Unyielding and unending, they fly in the face of the common expectation that a rapper be intelligible. A Dusted review of a prior Dose One effort described one of his “great strengths” as “that, through his inimitable delivery, his attention to syllable placement and phonetics, and the sheer complexity of his rhymes, he thoroughly convinces the listener that there’s something going on in there.” Respectfully, this critic begs to differ. It is precisely his delivery, his complexity, his intense attention to the sounds and rhythm of his lyrics – in short, his obdurate formalism – that is Doseone’s greatest weakness. That his verbosity suggests that “something is going on” is really an indictment of the fact that there’s much less than the hail of words implies....full text |
| Comfortcomes |
| Upon first listening to Themselves’ new album CrownsDown, they sound downright awkward, like they’re trying to be something they’re not. They sound almost like a demonic, technofied version of Public Enemy or any other early 90s rap group. But, upon further inspection, Themselves’ are definitely not posers. While their new age demonic, techno hip-hop, might be a bit much too handle in the beginning, if you actually give this underground music a chance, you will definitely not regret it. The extremely fast rhymes will keep your head spinning and the up-tempo beats will keep you moving and smiling. So if at first sound you don’t like CrownsDown, give it a second spin. I guarantee you won’t be disappointed. This artistic hip-hop is definitely something you don’t want to miss out on....full text |
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