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Rating: It's never easy to talk about hip-hop. The genre is all too prone to stereotypes and defamation, with the help of the mass media always ready to give us a glamorous and stale image. But this time we're talking about hip-hop far from the spotlight and maybe even underground.
Beans is famous in the scene for being one of the mc's of the AntiPop Consortium, one of the most rebellious and avant-garde American crews, and this 'Tomorrow Right Now' is his second album: a work completely aimed at illustrating a very personal style far from the mainstream.
The first distinctive feature to strike is our man's rapping, lanky and almost arrhythmic, quite solipsistic and indifferent to the beats. However, these are never of low quality, but most of the time well-crafted and original: listen carefully to the r'n'b parody of Phreek The Beet, Mearle which seems like a pseudo-glitch newscast from desolate lands or the rather menacing trance background of Raping Silence (if it weren't for the ironic cadence of the voice, you'd say the aggressive Tricky of the past is back). And maybe Toast wouldn't have looked out of place on 'Blemish' if David Sylvian had been a rapper...
In the long run, this work can get a bit tiring, too much snobbish attitude doesn't pay off and mockery even less so if overused; but other tracks are good: Rose Periwinkle Plum is very lyrical despite being sickly, a nightmare-ish Slow Broken, the concluding and in its own way soft Walking By Night and especially Crave which, supported only by sparse human beatboxing, is perhaps the symbol of a healthy tendency to strip down, almost a path to achieving a kind of hip-hop asceticism, dangerous yes but more convincing than the stylistic bulimia very much in vogue lately.
Tracklist and Videos
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