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.
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