Album Review: Raider Klan- Tales From The Underground


There are a few reasons why I wanted to write something about Tales From The Underground, the new Halloween-themed mixtape from SpaceGhostPurrp’s Raider Klan. The main reason is that it’s great. It’s claustrophobic, unsettling, and incredibly clever at times—“You’re second like Scotty Pippen,” is a lyric that arrives early on in the album during the first track, “Fuck What They Say.”

Another reason we need to talk about this is because I am fairly confident that SpaceGhostPurpp himself (or whoever runs his Twitter account) retweeted my Raider Klan related tweet from Halloween, where i talked about how much I liked the album--#realrap.



So just who is SpaceGhostPurpp, and what is the Raider Klan?

Purpp is one of many “Pitchfork” rappers—non-mainstream rappers who have risen to some level of fame via coverage from music’s favorite website. After they reviewed his 2011 mixtape Blvcklvnd Rvdix 66.6, Purpp showed up on my radar after he was signed to 4AD—the label best known for shoegaze and dreampop in the late 80s and early 90s, and a label that’s now home to The National and St. Vincent. Hailing from Miami, Purrp (whose given name is Markese Rolle) specializes in a very dark kind of rap music—codeine drenched beat, trap snares, violent lyrics, and murky atmospherics.

So Halloween seems like a fitting time for Purrp and his Raider Klan affiliates to release the relatively spooky Tales From The Underground. It’s not “spooky” in like a “Scary Sound Effects” tape you’d play at a shitty haunted house; it’s spooky in the sense that it’s like if David Lynch directed a hip-hop video.


As disconcerting as this mixtape can be at times, it’s incredibly listenable and almost always fascinating. A little on the lengthy side (clocking in at 72 minutes) the pacing can get a tad slow at times.  The subject matter can also wear a little thin at times—weed smoke, lean, bitches, money, shooting people, et. al. It’s all pretty standard. But for some reason, while the same concepts were incredibly grating on previous hip-hop records I’ve listened to this year, I’m willing to give Purpp and his crew a pass here.  I think that’s because the Raider Klan stick to the incredibly disconcerting personas they’ve created.

Musically, and stylistically, it is incredibly reminiscent of one of my favorite hip-hop tracks, actually—“Tonite is A Special Nite,” a collaboration between the RZA’s “horrorcore” rap group the Gravediggaz, and trip-hop forefather Tricky. Tales From The Underground shows that a new generation of performers has a handle on creating an underlying sense of dread throughout their music, and that hip-hop doesn’t always have to fun, or about the finer things in life, or about socio-economical issues—it can just straight up scare the shit out of you.

Tales From The Underground is available now in the iTunes Store.


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