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SMUSIC
ay this about Clipping: The abrasive Los
Angeles hip-hop trio certainly makes a night
out at the club feel like hell. Familiar hip-hop
tropes get the nightmare treatment throughout
the act’s proper debut, where beats sometimes
feel fashioned of the torture equipment found
in a slasher film series and rhymes place
uncomfortable close-ups on the desperate,
the misfits, the thugs, and the losers. When
Clipping raps about a cold-blooded killer, it
puts us not at the scene of the crime but inside
his apartment, where paper plates litter the
floor and an alarm clock, which doubles as the
song’s rhythm, won’t stop buzzing. All that’s
missing is the drool stain on a bed sheet.
Clipping
Like
CLPPNG
Sub Pop, LP or CD
the music of West
Coast kindred spirits Death
Grips, it’s not always an easy
listen. The soundscapes,
courtesy of producers
Jonathan Snipes and William
Hutson, are deranged low-fi.
It hits hard, as influenced by
Black Flag as it is Cypress
Hill—artists name-checked on
the album. “Body & Blood”
splices dentist-office drills
with a groove that could have
been created inside an empty
dumpster. Voices echo just
beyond the periphery, as
lyricist/rapper Daveed Diggs
takes pop-culture staples of
the past few months (think
twerking) and finds more
murderous uses for them.
“Dominoes” learns a trick or
two from “Hard Knock Life,”
with a children’s choir framed
around metallic rubber-band
grooves that emphasize
empty space. “Ends” should
drive the listener mad with its
CD-skipping sensation, and
“Summertime” will confound
or transfix, depending on how
one feels about the sound of
what sounds like the grinding
of breaking glass.
Characters in Diggs’
songs are most often hiding
something most of us would
prefer not to know. The
protagonist of “Story 2” is
spied on his way from a
bartending gig, angry that
life took a wrong turn when
he spots a “blue Acura, dent
on the left-rear fender” that
lets him know his past has
caught up to him. A thicktongued
narrator, Diggs
muscles his way through a
zig-zagging 8-bit groove to
leave the listener with details
that linger—the babysitter not
picking up her phone, the
awnings on the neighboring
home. Individuals dance
around sexual assault in
“Tonight”; a wayward noir
horn and machine-gun beats
document the inner-city
politics of “Taking Off.”
Similarly grim, “Inside
Out” places a wide-angle lens
on a murder scene, jumping
from the bitter cops to the
crooks that drive by, never
to get caught. Like watching
a gruesome documentary,
you’ll keep listening to this
promising debut long after
you told yourself you’d turn
away. —Todd Martens
56 TONE AUDIO NO.64
July 2014 57