Send "Anti" Ringtones to your Cell 
| Allmusic |
 During their few years together in the late '90s and early 2000s, Antipop Consortium blazed a trail for forward-thinking rap. The trio of Beans, High Priest, and M. Sayyid (plus the critical help of longtime engineer Earl Blaize) rapped plenty of abstract scientifical madness, but they also had intelligence and hardcore flow to spare (think A Tribe Called Quest plus Marvel Comics). Musically, they were influenced by electronica but they also had the hard-hitting beats necessary for survival in a heavily competitive rap world. (Not for nothing were they on Warp, one of the best places to find experimental hip-hop in the early 2000s.) Of course, it's always a grand proposition when standard-bearers return after a long absence, but no one in rap or experimental techno could have been fully prepared for Fluorescent Black, easily their best record -- packed with more highlights than anything they'd released before, but also more cohesive than they'd ever been. With heavy claps on the beat but experimental effects shooting all over the mix, it's just as innovative as fans would expect. And the rapping sounds rejuvenated, with Beans particularly, as Antipop Consortium rap over the best beats they've heard in years (despite a healthy number of projects during the interim). None of this is going to sell enough records to bother Jay-Z, and a track or two veer too close to MF Doom for comfort, but Fluorescent Black is easily one of the best rap records of the year....full text |
| Drownedinsound |
| Several years after Anti-Pop Consortium imploded following their blistering Arrhythmia long-player, hip-hop finds itself in as varied a state as it’s ever been. On one side of the spectrum you’ve got the chart-hogging, unchallenging pop fodder that’s been doing the rounds in more or less the same state since the turn of the millennium – and at the opposite end there are, as ever, a host of independent artists twisting their concepts of the genre into new and exciting shapes. Of particular note are LA’s collectives, loosely grouped around Flying Lotus, Samiyam et al, who have taken the low-slung template J Dilla left as his legacy and infused it into a potent cocktail of dubstep, urban sleaze and skunk smoke. Purely in terms of sound, the re-emergence of Beans, M. Sayyid, High Priest and Earl Blaize into the environment of now couldn’t be more appropriately timed. Anti-Pop’s beats were never conceived as a mere conduit for vocal play - the attention paid to musical detail across their earlier albums and indeed on their comeback, Fluorescent Black, places them firmly alongside their younger contemporaries in ambition, if not entirely in aesthetic. A blaze of guitar distortion hammers home the start of opener ‘Lay Me Down’ with all the subtlety and finesse of a chainsaw; as opening gambits go it’s an appropriate one. However tenuous the split, at the arrival of a ‘comeback’ album there’s always that question hanging uneasily at the back of the mind: is it really going to be any good? Such a concern is firmly dispelled by the time the smoke clears and High Priest’s swaggering entrance reintroduces the group as they “awaken from that permanent nap”....full text |
| Popmatters |
| The genesis of Anti-Pop Consortium’s latest album comes after, some will assume, major personal shifts in the group. After the release of 2002’s Arryhthmia, the New York avant-hop brigade disbanded amid reports of internal dysfunction, reports that turned out to be a little exaggerated. As it turns out, Fluorescent Black is nothing more than a culmination of natural progressions, expanding ideas and some well-deserved downtime, and that in itself is reason enough to herald its arrival with due celebration. What’s most striking, immediately, is how unfussy it sounds. Compositions tend to hover between two and four minutes, and use economy to their absolute advantage. Not one single word is wasted, as you’d expect, even when they’re creating something of a sing-along on “Apparently”. Amid talk of BlackBerrys and encroaching technological claustrophobia, some of Earl Blaize’s most direct and sparse beats crackle underneath the typically virtuosic vocal deliveries – a collision of not only mind and matter, but hips and shakes as well. Indeed, the meeting point between man and machine is one tirelessly explored by this intrepid quartet, and provides much focus for Fluorescent Black. More so than on previous work, the balancing act between mechanised precision and effortless human luminance takes centre stage. The result of this is an absolute inability to settle, maximising the entertainment for the listener but surely deepening the intellectual well from which the Consortium can now draw. “Capricorn One” is just about unfathomable if you take the buzzing sledgehammer synths at face value, an impenetrable bastion of conniving beats and tones. Only by the reasoned, balanced, and occasionally exhilarating wordplay do we gain the human insight, and it is the tension therein that creates the most pleasure....full text |
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