Danny Brown
Atrocity Exhibition

“A voice like this, you either love it or hate it.” I will never understand what that means, but it appears in almost every article about Danny Brown. How to define such a vocal tone? “Particular” seems like the bare minimum, “unique” less exaggerated than it might seem. In rap, originality is everything. Well, it should be at least. This rapper and this record bring originality in spades. Starting with the musical/cultural references: if you sample a funky track and mention Dr. Dre, more or less all the west side rappers will understand where you're heading. If you take the title of your album from a Joy Division song (or the homonymous novel?), and that of the opening track, which by the way is very beautiful, from Nine Inch Nails (“Downward Spiral”), you're likely to collect a series of question marks.

Let's clear up any misunderstandings: the guy has everything that marks the difference between a dud and a phenomenon in this field. Style, technique, and flow are accompanied by a taste for the grotesque and dark atmospheres. He also has something that most of his colleagues, including the good ones, usually lack: a producer with a good ear and a consistent vision, who manages the entire project. The name Paul White might not mean much, but his beats speak volumes. The guy who thinks a little, actually happens to be white and also British, perfectly fits distorted guitars and acid synths into rhythm structures far more varied than the usual rap four-four time.

If you call to rap on the same track the king of million-dollar productions (Kendrick Lamar) and the bedroom demo king (Earl Sweatshirt), you automatically become the coolest in the neighborhood. If you do a track about smoking with B-Real from Cypress Hill, maybe even in the city. If you effortlessly shift from beats that almost start a rave to others that feel like, “wait, are we in Berlin before the wall fell?!”, I begin to understand this showy love for drugs. You listen to “Tell Me What I Don’t Know” and... Who's this? Still him, but with a completely different voice. Important lyrics, by the way.

There is really a lot of great stuff to listen to, there's a production by Alchemist that shakes the walls, but above all, there's this sleazy freak that's a continuous blast. Somewhere between the madness of Ol’ Dirty Bastard and the goofy humor of the Pharcyde, filtered through an imagination more rooted in other genres and a substantial dose of amphetamines.