I am not much of a rap expert. This is not because I dislike the genre (in fact it’s quite a cool one) but because I’m a right picky bastard. This exceeds to other genres too, mind you, but rap to my ears seems to have the quality to offer stonkingly great tunes but not so often excellent albums. But every once in a blue moon when I actually grab myself and lift my arse off the chair I actually do some adventurous research into the genre I’m not that deep in with, and sometimes during those adventures there’s a full album that destroys my Forcefield of Pickiness.

Today, we are talking about Curse ov Dialect’s Wooden Tongues and quite frankly, I haven’t got the faintest idea how to describe it. Curse ov Dialect themselves hail from Australia, Wooden Tongues is their third album and Rate Your Music defines its genre as ‘abstract hip hop’. I prefer the genre tag ‘batshit insane’ or ‘Mighty Boosh in hip-hop form’. The most random plethora of samples pop up at the most random times and are rapped over by the most random voices. Each song has at least one part that sounds like it belongs to a completely different song. It’s absolutely daft. And it’s in fact pretty good.

The thing with the eclectic nature of Wooden Tongues is that it hits the goal as much as it hits off the target. There are moments when the weirdness just seems to be quirky for quirky’s sake rather than anything truly inspired, and then all of a sudden the song turns into some genuinely amazing choice that sounds nothing like anything else. On the plus side it definitely keeps your interest rate up, on the minus side it brings an unwanted element of uneven quality to the table. And like many rap albums, Wooden Tongues is a bit too long for its own good – it’s ‘only’ 57 minutes which is relatively short in the world of rap but the hyperactive nature of the music has started to get a bit tiresome by the end of it all. Which isn’t helped by the handful of the final songs being rather dull in themselves (outside the surprisingly nifty outro “Previous Decision”).

But for all the double-edged swords it offers, Wooden Tongues is still a good listen and definitely an interesting one. The ridiculous variety of samples and beats as well as the countles accents and voices the band pulls out sound very little like anything else. The fact that it’s all from Australia also gives its own touch in the lyrical sense – while everything’s quite abstract, the approach of constantly bringing out Australian history and events puts it apart from the normally quite America-centric approach of the genre’s primary exposure point. And then there’s the certain gold giblets that seal the deal: the shamanistic groove mixed with ramshackle disco of “Bury Me Slowly”, the elegant “Broken Feathers” where the main sample elements are hauntingly beautiful female singing and regal combination of strings and harpsichord, oddly heartwarming and mellow “Sticks and Stones”, the giddy and playful “Word Up Forever” that really showers itself in the most random samples. “Jokes on Me”, on the other hand, is all of the above.

So it’s a bit uneven and the finishing steps are a bit meh. That’s okay, I forgive you. Wooden Tongues secretes this weird, mystic, abstract enthusiasm that at the same time is both brainlessly groovy and intriguingly multi-layered. It’s all kinds of crazy, an eclectic mixture of all sorts of different things that sometimes acts against its own good, but ensures its position as something that one definitely remembers – in my case, remembering it very well. It’s flawed, but it’s good and most of all exciting.

Bury Me Slowly

MP3: Word Up Forever
MP3: Broken Feathers

Buy Wooden Tongues

Tags: curse ov dialect

This entry was posted on Monday, June 22nd, 2009 at 2:51 pm and is filed under Album ramble. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.