The Money Store - Death Grips

Noteworthy

 Judge an album by its cover on this one — on the right is a woman with a muffin-top and pocked legs wearing a leather biker hat and cut-off overalls, and on the left is some freakish male creature in a gimp mask, a thong, a bag holding a rubber chicken and bolted-on tits (covered up, of course. This is a family blog).

As if discovered in the basement of the pawn shop in Pulp Fiction, the experimental hip-hop group Death Grips captures a rather unsettling and intensely visceral mood on its debut album, The Money Store.

The Sacramento trio — consisting of MC Ride, drummer Zach Hill and producer Flatlander — has created some of the strangest, most otherworldly music imaginable. There is something to Death Grips that conveys both a futuristic quality as well as a primal spirit. This group's melodies are probably what those four-limbed, indigenous aliens from John Carter danced to while they smoked space peyote.

MC Ride, the mad witchdoctor of the crew, delivers his occult incantations with echoes and alacrity, even though his vocabulary shows little penchant for wordplay. It's Ride's voice, so omnipresent and bombastic but also so empty and inscrutable, that drives this LP in terms of its combination of trip-hop and noise rock.

To carry the tremendous beat of the latter is Hill, who on "Hustle Bones" demonstrates how he was born as an 808 machine. The kinds of rhythms Hill produces cannot be a human playing on a Tama kit. Even though there is considerable syncopation in Flatlander's instrumentation (which can come out of nowhere as either samples or phasers or sirens), Hill can always be counted on to keep the listener on the same page as the producer and Ride provide a controlled chaos.

It's hard to make out if The Money Store is some sign of a devilish nightmare come to life or the likely chants of hunters from a desolate world where life is little more than a place to live out sick fancies. Half way through "The Cage," it is evident how humans, without order, can become incensed, jittery marauders who dance in the light of a blood red moon on top of the rubble of civilization. Despite Death Grip's evident disregard, a side of the listener cannot help but embrace the strange attractiveness of this unbridled beat. Strangely rabid and grossly wild, such rare and rebellious vitality should be worthy of the bored and the adventurous


For Your Consideration: "Hustle Bones," "The Cage."

For Next Time: Not sure yet, but see you Thursday.