When music reviewers talk about genre-blending, they most often mean the seamless incorporation of one genre into another. Projects like Kendrick Lamar’s To Pimp a Butterfly from last year exemplify the smooth polish that most artists go for when experimenting with other forms of music. On Danny Brown’s newest project, Atrocity Exhibition, the combination is closer to blending together ice and rock than it is to Kendrick’s strawberries and frozen yogurt.
Post-punk basslines and drum patterns are flying all over the place, colliding with Danny’s frantic cadence and the incredible sampling work done on most of this album by producer Paul White. Nowhere is this inaccessible, ingenious choppiness more evident than on the very first track, “Downward Spiral.” The haphazard drums and guitar licks fly around sporadically, like bees in a beehive, yet they always land in the right place. The title serves as the album’s first triple entendre: it’s simultaneously a nod to Nine Inch Nails, an obvious influencer, and a reference to the intro to his 2011 classic: XXX, on whose title track he raps: “it’s the downward spiral, got me suicidal/But too scared to do it so these pills will be the rifle.” These topics: hitting rock bottom, suicidal thoughts, fear, and drugs all reappear throughout the album, bringing us to the third meaning of the song – that emotionally, this album is all downhill from here.
The beehive metaphor above encompasses the whole album. It’s a bunch of crazy ideas flying around in a confined space that somehow turn into something organized in the end. Why not rap like a possessed B-Real (who appears later on the album) over a pseudo-RZA beat with a saxophone playing over it like he does on “Lost”? Why not toss Earl Sweatshirt, Kendrick Lamar, and Ab-Soul over a Black Milk beat and try not to get bodied? All of the decisions Danny makes over the course of the album feel like dumb ones as each individual track starts, but by the end of the song, and the album, it all begins to form an interesting, cohesive image.
The three most initially bewildering by tracks on the project: “Really Doe”, “When it Rain”, and “Ain’t it Funny”, end up being three of its best. “Really Doe” first shocks the listener with its drastic switch-up from the three tracks before it. It keeps the horror film vibe of the album, but switches up the production style drastically. Black Milk is one of the most slept on producers in the game, (If you haven’t already, check out his last full-length If There’s a Hell Below, you won’t be disappointed) and this might be his best beat of the past couple years. The haunting bell samples fit perfectly over the hard drums and the bassline that just sits there looking you menacingly in the eye the entire track. All four rappers kill the track, but Earl zips it up at the end with one of his best verses yet, “It’s the left handed shooter, Kyle Lowry the pump/I’m at your house like ‘why you got your couch on my chucks’” might be the best couple of bars to end a verse this year. “When it Rain,” the first single off the album, is an entirely different beast. And beast is the perfect word to describe it. The song is all Danny and producer Paul White, the beat builds to almost unbearable tension, feeling like it’s about to drop at any second. This weird, jarring, largely drumless arrangement of bass licks, shakers and corkscrew sound effects creates a perfect tension to match Danny’s frantic rhymes. “Kid don’t play, wanna catch that fade?” “Ain’t it Funny”, the craziest and most experimental track on the album, sounds like the sonic equivalent of a roller coaster gone off the tracks. It’s one of those songs that’s hard to describe in words, just be prepared to wonder whether or not your speakers are broken when the beat hits.
“I could sell honey to a bee,” Brown yelps on the first verse of “Ain’t it Funny”. Is this album as accessible and as “for everyone” as his last album, Old, was? No. However, in a great year of music, this might be 2016’s best and most challenging hip hop project. He could’ve sold us the honey and festival bangers Old was full of, but instead we got sold the bees’ venom – the pain, confusion and gritted teeth that comes with the comedown from whatever drugs he was high on when he made Old.
