Death Grips – Exmilitary (2011) [Self-Released] // Grade: A-

A month or so ago I was poking around the web, putting stuff together for a Friday Morning Videos, when I stumbled upon the video for a song called “Full Moon (Death Classic)” by something called Death Grips. For whatever reason I decided to play it, and was greeted with 4 minutes of some of the hardest, most aggressive, angry, cacophonous music I had heard in years. It was almost hard to listen to. And I fucking loved it. I put it in the FMV’s thinking “am I crazy or is this totally great?”

Death Grips’ amelodic avant garde hip hop shouldn’t work, but the power coursing through the music was intoxicating. It was so different than anything I had heard, the people behind it (at the time) so mysterious, that it felt as though it had congealed out of nowhere. It was only later that I learned Death Grips had somewhat of a pedigree, featuring the drumming of Zach Hill (Hella). Over the next few weeks I eagerly anticipated more releases, and was recently gifted with a new single “Lord Of The Game”, and then, a few days ago, a mixtape, Exmilitary.

Lo and behold: still hard, still unique, still raw as all hell, and still fantastic. Any rap album that opens with an extended Charles Manson clip, well, it ain’t gonna be normal. The roots become more apparent the more you listen, most notably Saul Williams and some of Hill’s noisier experimentation with the Rodriguez-Lopez/Bixler-Zavala crowd. Nevertheless, I would find it hard to mistake Death Grips for any other artist, even with their minimal output thus far.

Basically, in less than 15 tracks Death Grips have not only honed a sound that I frankly can’t get enough of, but also made sure they’re the only place you can get it. Running through time signatures and spastic instrumentations with an ADD vigor, Exmilitary sounds like a Antipop Consortium party soundtracked by Lightning Bolt. Sprinting between topics as vast as Mayan rituals and Anarchic revolutions in the span of a single bar, the currently nameless rapper (hell, maybe it is Williams) angrily rides Hill’s snaky drumlines while showing his undoubtedly torn vocal cords no relief.

His ability to keep up with bizarre rhythms actually sort of reminded me of a certain Dipset rapper. Except this guys seems to have grown up listening to industrial music and writing vicious poetry. The sounds around him range from glitchy drum and bass (“Blood Creepin”), dystopian ragga (“Lord Of The Game”), drone (“Beware”), and even chopped up chillwave (“Known For It”). All of these, of course, jacked up way past 11. Death Grips is, in a word, awesome. More please. Download Exmilitary here or stream it below.

- Whole Milk