Metro Zu – Mink Rug (2012) [Self-Released] // Grade: B

The first thing I noticed about Florida group Metro Zu’s newest mixtape Mink Rug is it’s cover. Two chicks making out something fierce. It’s pretty hard not to notice that. And like the cover suggests, this is a mixtape full of sex raps. No, not every song on Mink Rug is about sex, just most. And, truthfully that’s not a bad thing in the slightest given the talent behind it and the fact that’s going through the Raider Klan’s nostalgic/futuristic filter.

Metro Zu’s two emcees Ruben Slikk and Lofty are super witty, creative and hilarious guys so they pull off the “dirty rap” thing great. Their swag is awesome because you can really hear the fun the dudes are having rapping. The third member of Metro Zu is the producer Mr. B whose beats are pretty diverse from track to track. Some are very solid southern trap beats, some are soulful more “hip hop” and some are straight electro dance jams.

An example of the varying sounds on this mixtape happens right away in the difference between track one and two. The tape opens with one of the tape’s most trap-sounding songs “Sell Ma Ho” which sounds almost like a Future song minus the autotune. It has the pretty funny nonsensical hook “First thing first Imma sell my ho…second thing first: Imma sell my ho.” I don’t’ know exactly why I find that funny. I think it’s because they say “Second thing first.”

The next song is the title track (and probably the mixtape’s best song) “Mink Rug” produced by freebase and featuring SpaceGhostPurrp. The “Mink Rug” beat is like a throwback to oldschool UGK. The hook/concept of the song is ridiculous just like most of this tape’s tracks “Bitch, sit on my mink.” What I see is a 70s porn going down. The hilarious porn imagery Metro Zu and SGP conjure up of having sex party with “four bad bitches” on a mink Rug is great. Plus, the song is phonky as hell.

Later in the tape we get “RobotSlorBetch” which is like the sort of track LMFAO would make if they weren’t solely trying to court 14 year olds. It’s a pretty goofy electro party song, but unlike LMFAO it isn’t obnoxious in trying to be a bar mitzvah hit. Also: One of the first lines of the song is “this goes out to my Android 18s.” I’m a Dragonball Z fan, we’ll leave it at that.

The tape’s last track “C.O.D” is another track that walks the line between being humerous and serious and again pulls it off really well. With a title referencing Call of Duty and a chaotic epic, swirling orchestra beat featuring gunshot noises, I would expect this to be a song about shooting people. But nope. The hook is “Cocked back, target locked I’m bust to bust a nut up on her crotch.” So, I guess it is about shooting per say…

Mink Rug is mostly fun raps and cool beats. But, to me, that’s good hip hop and  a bit of  a lost art form in the scene. I’m sure Uncle Luke would be very proud to see these guys carrying his torch for Florida.

Download Metro Zu’s Mink Rug (Click Here)

No matter how awful they are, anthology films are always fun. If one story sucks, it won’t be long until you’re onto the next one. They always make good party films when you have some friends over. They have a special place in my heart – I wrote a fairly extensive look at horror anthologies for Topless Robot a couple years ago. The Theater Bizarre, the first film bankrolled and distributed by our friends at Severin Films (Bloody Birthday, The Baby), collects some diverse horror legends and craftsmen to weave together six tales or terror. Six tales with lots and lots of blood. So much blood.

The frame story involves a girl with runny makeup going into a closed-down theater where a slightly horrifying, robotic Udo Kier delivers esoteric intros to all six stories. It’s not really a frame “story” as it is an excuse for Kier to be a creep. I liked some of the tales better than others, one I hated so much you’ll get to read me bitch about it several times within this review.

Richard Stanley (Hardware, Dust Devil) kicks off the bizarre with a mash-up of Celtic paganism and Lovecraftian mythology called “The Mother of Toads.” A young anthropologist and his annoying girlfriend are traveling through rural France when they stop at a market. The girl finds some classy pewter earrings which her man instantly recognizes as being in the shape of Lovecraft’s Elder Sign. The leathery old woman selling the earrings says her family has a copy of the Necronomicon (if you don’t know what that is, it’s over) and she’d be happy to show it to them.  It’s horribly acted and the story isn’t particularly shocking, but it does feel like a Lovecraft tale: a young student thinks he knows his shit and his thirst for knowledge of the unknown leads to his demise. And it’s super slimy!

Things pick up a bit in the next short, “I Love You”, a tense, blood-stained look at a doomed relationship directed by Buddy Giovinazzo (Combat Shock). A controlling boyfriend foaming at the mouth with jealousy tries to convince his lying whore of a girlfriend that no matter what how much she spreads her legs, he still loves her. The ending is a bit of a head-scratcher, but still enjoyable for Giovinazzo’s raw style and use of people who can actually act. Despite its violent nature (or maybe because of this) “I Love You” felt like the most personal of all the shorts.

Next up is horror make-up god Tom Savini‘s “Wet Dreams.” Thank god for Savini’s short. It’s super fun and the least serious of all the shorts. It features the goriest string of gross-outs of all the shorts, but the least substance, which is fine on this playing field. A douchebag keeps having dreams about a weird toucan-vagina monster thingy, his therapist (played by Savini) talks about raping his mother, and then a girl goes “This is my dream, bitch!”

Douglas Buck (Sisters) delivers the worst of the shorts, “The Accident.” It’s all about life and death through the eyes of a child and bikers hitting deer. It’s artiness just comes off as incompetence. Thankfully, it’s the shortest of the shorts.

Karim Hussain (The Beautiful Beast) brings a pretty interesting story to the table with “Vision Stains.” A girl gets her rocks off by stealing other people’s vitreous fluid with a needle and then injected the fluid in her own eye. Through this she gets to visit their memories. Shit gets weird when she experiments with an unborn baby’s memories. I really like the idea of Hussain’s story a lot, but after watching a needle go in an eye for about the 10th time, I got kinda turned off.

The final short is David Gregory‘s “Sweets” – a hypercolor, ultra gory tale of people who love eating. “I just love masticating!” one girl exclaims. Gregory, who directed 2008′s Plague Town, took the crown with this short. It’s super creative visually and a spot-on mixture of comedy and horror. There’s lot of detail everywhere and it just feels like he took the most time with his segment and didn’t spend all his time making a fake penis, like Savini did.

I feel like there should have been one less short in The Theater Bizarre, and that short is Buck’s “The Accident.” It feels really out of place here and sort of drains all the fun out following Savini’s wacky blood stomp and Stanley’s Frog Whore. It’s like the sober kid at a party where everyone else is wasted. So besides that small buzzkill of a short, the overall film is pretty damn fun. You can tell no cigar-chomping studio suits had anything to do with it – it was made completely outside of the studio system by horror fans for horror fans. It’s like Midnight Madness Heaven!

The Theater Bizarre is in a limited run right now. Don’t miss it if it’s playing near you or Udo Kier will crawl in your room at night and tickle your feet.

Lindstrøm – Six Cups of Rebel (2012) [Smalltown Supersound] // Grade: B+

Hans-Peter Lindstrøm’s last album was a collaboration with Christabelle unlike anything he had done before. It led him to explore a brand new realm of music making: there were vocals, and the songs had to be short. His usual 15 to 20 minute running times just were not suitable for the pop ambitions of Real Life Is No Cool. And I think that Lindstrøm learned a lot from that experience. Shorter lengths do not necessarily mean less creative space (as the actress said to the bishop) and on Six Cups of Rebel he made each song on this album a movement to what could really be considered a 53 minute song which begins and ends with organ arpeggios.

He also decided to add some vocal parts – his own vocals. So the changes are fundamentally fundamental. But this is the same Lindstrøm who has been steady delivering space oddisseys in the last few years. This one is not just an epic, it’s an opera. Flowing through disco to funk to prog to acid house through fields of drum meteors and into the deep deep dark corners of the Church of the Hypnotoad. Who knew that Sun Ra and Robert Fripp had a secret Norwegian dancehall lovechild? By the time you reach the end of ‘Call me Anytime’ (arguably the weirdest track on this album) that lovechild might as well be a reality.

The result is pretty convincing if you ask me. It’s groovy but not crass, with an extraordinary new-age vibe that would be off-putting in any other situation. But he makes it work with just a touch of psychedelic tribalism – but again, tasteful. It actually seems to me like the vocals pull their tracks out of any hypothetical abysmal ditch. They’re treated just like throwback disco vox: not always sensible or audible, but definitely adding relief and lifting the mood. That’s something else which is striking in this album by the way: for all the dancey-ness and glitter, the atmosphere is not all smiles – even rather oppressive sometimes. Track two repeats “can’t get no relief” over and over again; track four “all I want is a quiest place to live”, over and over again as if these were an ode to depression in a cartoon directed by Werner Herzog.

There are many moments on this album that make you think: is this a synth or a guitar? is this a beat or a tweaked out snare? Is that a clavi or a bandoneon on Magik? And what kind of magik do YOU do? How many people are on this album exactly? Just one. It’s one fair skinned man and his machines, in a studio that probably doubles as a bedroom. And so I ask: what kind of audience will this appeal to? Besides Lindstrøm himself that is. Not that his audience was very wide already, but he won’t gain very many fans from this one. Also: did he just invent chamber disco? (Google says no, somebody else used the term already. But they should give it up). The music is not fit for much else besides the bedroom. It would probably be great for an intergalactic diner, or some kind of VIP lounge in a hoverboarding skate park. Whoever is making that Jetsons’ movie NEEDs to license some of this. I find the album lovely, but it will probably not be everybody’s cup of tea. Short attention spans and optimists will be puzzled. Their loss.

Xiu Xiu – Always (2012) [Bella Union/Polyvinyl] // Grade: B+

Xiu Xiu’s ten year anniversary release Always is a grand achievement of sonic destruction that sits wonderfully atop their highly prolific musical career.  I still remember the first time I heard the classic track “Ian Curtis Wishlist” from 2003’s A Promise. The track feels as if it is compelling you to either weep or shake violently and this unique sensation is evident in almost all of their works such as the classic cover of Tracy Chapman’s “Fast Car” and the downright insane delivery of “I Broke Up.”
Always comes right out of the gate with a bang of intense jagged shuddering sound. Jamie Stewart’s crackling voice and ultra-realism lyrics still resonate with the same intensity of that very first listen so many years ago. The first track “Hi” blasts out with a rattling wall of percussion bits (hats, tambourines) over a steady kick and unusual snare wrapped in synths and fuzz which erupts into choir samples on the chorus before returning to sickly detuning synths and subtle guitar chops. The track is a definitive cacophony of jarring sounds and gripping melodies.

The album somehow maintains a wonderful cohesion while still being extremely disjointed and abstractly dynamic. On “I Love Abortion” the spoken (screaming) word of J.S. takes over embedded in a noise bath that is at once harsh, vibrant, and brittle before descending into the beautiful piano melancholia of “The Oldness.” “Gul Mudin” is full of the most glitched guitar I’ve ever heard and “Born to Suffer” soars on a layer of sweet ‘80s strings and drum sounds soaked in verbed choir explosions. The album winds down to the epic ballad “Factory Girl” before finally ending in “Black Drum Machine” which walks you through a zen garden before unleashing (spoiler alert!) catastrophic distortion at bleeding ear levels.

I always found it amazing how Xiu Xiu seems to sound honestly lo-fi and hi-fi at the same time without falling into the trap of coming across gimmicky. They have the uncanny ability to just battle through with such an intense delivery as if the song or world is actually falling apart, but Mr. Jamie Stewart will somehow hold it together.

A troubled brooding doctor with Daddy issues and perhaps a case of latent alcoholism finds himself stranded in a verdant jungle setting with a small group. Soon they are beset upon by a monster that chk-chk-chk’s through the trees and is composed entirely of black smoke. After his love interest is hurt, they share a scene in which he tells a story from his past while a wound is stitched. Then, he begins to see visions of his supposedly dead father in the trees. What show is this you ask? LOST? No sir, it’s ABC‘s The River! What?!

As many complaints as I had about The River, and as many as I’ve seen hurled at it from other reviewers, I was stunned no one else pointed out how much open thievery from the iconic pilot episode of LOST was occurring. Though it’s not the biggest deal in the world (though for a Lostie it’s pretty fucking annoying) it’s indicative of the fact that, unfortunately, ABC’s new found footage horror doesn’t really have much new to bring to the table.

The show, produced by Oren Peli and Steven Spielberg (who appears to have had, oh, .0001% involvement with it), concerns the treacherous attempted rescue of the aforementioned father, nature show host Dr. Emmett Cole. Played by Bruce Greenwood doing a mighty fine Sam Neill impression, Cole went missing in the Amazon 6 months prior to the start of the series, on a quest, as we eventually learn, to find some sort of magical “Source” in the jungle. Okay…

His wife, Tess (Leslie Hope, the murked off wife from 24), enlists her petulant son (the wildly misused Joe Anderson. So good in The Crazies. So bad here…) and Emmett’s former camera team to go search for him and blah blah blah, shaky cam, smoke monster, goofy emotional shit, oh it’s been two hours already? Okay maybe that’s a little unfair. But not by much. Right now none of the characters are at all strong enough to hold the show together, nor, surprisingly, is there really a cohesive feel of setting or place.

For being set in the fucking Amazon, this thing really isn’t taking advantage of that, and is instead hanging classic horror tropes loosely (so loosely…) on the too-green color corrected leaves. And it’s the first episode! In an attempt to be a monster-of-the-week show instead of a mythology show, the characters and setting have to bend and twist each hour to accomodate the new baddie. Whereas this neck-snapping battle of tones works for a self-aware show like American Horror Story that gleefully vaults over the top, for the po-faced River it’s deadly.

The first hour concerned the smoke monster, some sort of angry vengeful spirit of someone I didn’t give a fuck about and then okay the smoke monster is gone now. Second hour: dolls. Evil dolls. Come the fuck on! That’s the best you could come up with for the Amazon? I’ll admit that there were some creepy shots in this episode but that’s because dolls are just creepy looking, not because you’re smart or clever Oren Peli! Oh, and the fact that the whole world seems to be rigged up with cameras anyway pretty much made me forget it was a found footage piece. Unfortunately, the track record of horror on TV remains very spotty. Very spotty indeed.

Mux Mool -Planet High School (2012) [Ghostly] // Grade: A-

If Mux Mool’s debut full-length Skulltaste rounded up the familiar sounds of NES-generation suburban boredom, Planet High School channels its mid-20-something future self: The older brother a few years out of college, still enamored of all that frantic wackiness, sure, just slightly more even-keeled in expressing it. We’re not talking some major about-face here — Mux Mool’s still dealing in the same shades of chiptune, drum and bass, downtempo and hip-hop that defined Skulltaste — but there’s enough confidence and restraint about Planet High School to make you wonder if maybe, just maybe, Brian Lindgren’s beginning to chill out. You know, a little.

Because really, Planet High School shines brightest in its most relaxed moments. Lindgren’s production goes all buttery and smooth here, with tracks like “Ruin Everything” and the prancing two-step staccato of “Palice Chalice” building effortlessly into a labyrinth of beat and bass. There’s something almost Royksopp-ish about the way these harmonies weave through each other, even the harsher, bitcrushed arpeggios of “Raw Gore”; it’s that instant emotional connection of notes to nostalgia, a tough-to-define atmosphere shifting its mood with every measure.

‘Course, this being Mux Mool and all, that mood often shifts into sheer sonic overload. The back-and-forth breakbeats of “Live at 7-11”, that wicked wobble in “Get Yer Alphabets (Guns)”; this is where Planet High School sends your head spinning, goes vertiginous in all its ramped up excitement. It’s that iconic Skulltaste vibe, only here it’s treated as an accent to the album’s pacing rather than its heavy core. You might wonder how you got from point A to B, but rest assured: Planet High School always spins you back around to center. Just like a good older brother should.

The Twilight Sad – No One Can Ever Know (2012) [FatCat] // Grade: B

Returning again for the Fat Cat label, somber Scottish trio The Twilight Sad deliver a pensive 42-minute swath through recoil that will no doubt give longtime fans of the group something to talk about once it snaps back to ears. Bred on what felt like a mixture of their homeland’s noted impact on post punk and the everyday, emotional grants coming from indie’s lovers and post rock’s divers, The Twilight Sad now deliver their version two: one steeped in relative scarcity and propped up by sounds pulled from industrial, kraut or avant-garde pop experiments.

Enjoying a fairly moderate, yet successful run under the critical shade since their inception in 2003, The Twilight Sad have always lived up to their name in creating moody, rock creations that blossomed at the selling point of your girlfriend also being able to get down- not too ‘goth’ but just ‘goth’ enough. Record covers depicted slightly off-kilter drawings of suffocation by pillow or masked children playing while the tracks themselves could, without much stretch, soundtrack a solitary drive under moonlight, the aftermath of a lover’s quarrel. It proved interesting then watching their contemporaries, notably fellow Scots Glasvegas, have a harder time advancing and (in their own race) get over the hurdle of Interpol (née Joy Division) obsession, their poised run turning quickly into a trot.

So, it’s pleasing then on No One Can Ever Know how vocalist James Graham leads guitarist/programmer Andy MacFarlane and drummer/programmer Mark Devine through experiments in atmospherics and textures that exist here for the the first time on a TS record. There’s heavy theatrics, throbbing militancy, icy synths and digitized, looping unease all mingling with the act’s known, emotive effect at producing something distinguishing. The thick, shoegazing sound bed that filled their earlier work is gone and replaced by a more desolate wander giving the record the near feeling of a swaddled heart- the alive and beating middle ground exists, but when it’s influence from the likes of Magazine, PiL and NIN as the blood pumping through it all, it’s noticeably harder to always find that responsive pulse.

Lyrically, the material on No One doesn’t feel that different from before. Again we find the band letting their songs function as a setting where Graham’s impacting dialogue lives through moody and slinky instrumental action. Before we break new ground, fans of the older material not yet wanting to yet trade their Arab Strap for Nine Inch Nails certainly have a few songs to embrace: “Don’t Look At Me” is a fuller and bounding trip while well-deserving single “Another Bed” edges close to stadium-filling ilk with that dark, engaging synth-supported oomph nearby. Playing though as creature comforts in a foreign land, these songs aren’t at all the best examples of the band’s new path. Debut single “Sick” mixes Hail to the Thief sequenced mood and glittery Cure keyboards; “Not Sleeping” wanders for over half the track, until kit-pounding percussion and vocal wails aide its coda to a dry and blunt finish; Perfect of No One, “Nil” is a paced, brooding and passionate slice and for those after Trent Reznor and his Nails, it’s the last tune, “Kill in the Morning” that’s drenched in thick, distorted bass, incessant and mechanical elements and personal vocal calls.

“Kill” in particular cradles some of No One’s best moments. An already heavy song, the second half clinches with what’s likely the entire album’s most uneasy moment under theatrical warn and buzzing, discordant swirls that build to end both the song and album at Graham and Graham only. In a sentiment that could likely be pinned on The Twilight Sad’s entire catalog, the singer in a half scream, half sing, lets out, “What more do you need to know, staying here well down below” and the tune is over. Flirting with the darker side of things might not always lead to open arms, but it’s definitely filled with some very vibrant and enticing emotional moments, eh?

A Place To Bury Strangers – Onwards to the Wall (2012) [Dead Oceans] // Grade: C+

There is a time and a place for a band to dial back on the intensity. Oftentimes it’s an acknowledgment of, well, not a maturity, but an aging. For musicians that have spent their entire careers going to 11, sometimes stripping away the violence can reveal things in their sound that perhaps not even they knew were there. But that has to be a place and idea reached naturally, not one taken on as an exercise, either in testing yourself or the audience’s expectations. Almost a decade into their careers, A Place To Bury Strangers’ just released a new EP that loses the immediate blast of Exploding Head, and doesn’t gain much in the process.

On first glance, the post-punk/shoegaze sound remains relatively unchanged. But as I made my way through the five tracks of Onwards to the Wall, there was an increasingly palpable lack of intensity. It has nothing to do with volume, but more commitment. Oliver Ackermann has never had a particularly expressive voice, but the line between talk-singing and just talking is a very fine and very important one, and more often than not on Onwards he finds himself on the wrong side of it. The rest of the band meanwhile takes themselves to the edges of squall, reverb, and effect-pedaled guitar heroics that they’re well capable of, but end up pulling back. The mood they appear to be trying to conjure is a Joy Division-esque affectless grey, but I just don’t think that’s what they’re built for.

By the time the title track came along and Ackermann was joined on vocals by an equally flat inflected female singer, both of them backed up by a driving goth rhythm, the sense that I was listening to a misguided imitation was almost awkwardly pervasive. I imagine perhaps A Place To Bury Strangers got a little burnt out by touring, perhaps feeling put upon the be “that loud noise band.” But whatever they were trying to prove on this one, it just didn’t fit.

Lil B - White Flame (2012) [Based World] // Grade: B

It’s no secret that the music of Lil B isn’t for everyone. Trying to force it on the wrong ears is similar to trying to convince people of the Minutemen’s importance back in 1982. If most hardcore kids couldn’t quite wrap their heads around the off tempo brilliance of D, Watt and Hurley, how the hell was a mainstream music listener going to understand. The music of Brandon McCartney is almost a direct parallel. There is absolutely no hyperbole here, Lil B is THAT important.

A few bars into “Surrender to Me” and it becomes obvious what the man is about. Built on a soul sample that could have made Kanye millions, McCartney does something entirely different. In three minutes a beat best suited for the backpack gets assaulted by a barrage of off kilter stream of consciousness gangsta thugisms. This is Lil B crystallized, a walking dichotomy of form and fashion. It is why the ones that get him champion him as the most innovative hip hop artist to come out in… well, maybe forever. White Flame is a solid mixtape, it’s quality nestled somewhere between Based God Velli and Gold House. It isn’t quite the opus status that Lps like 6 Kiss and Angels Exodus are, but in many ways it is these mixtapes that truly explore the genius of Lil B.

Lyrically, this one is a return to McCartney’s Swag poetry. The past few releases (including the flawless Silent President) seemed to concentrate on the quirky yet sincere slice of life stories and inspirational raps that always seem to take second seat to the audacity more hardcore tracks. Whereas in the former you get a glimpse into the genuine spirit of Brandon McCartney, the latter almost crystallize the undercurrent of hip hop’s declines and put it on display. Quite simply, if one cannot stand Lil B’s shallow and comical boasting, they need to look at the lyrical content of the rest of the hip hop world. The music of Lil B is a mirror of everything that is going on around him. He sometimes seems a lone flower growing out of the rotting corpse of what was once the most vital force in music.

White Flame is a fun ride. Perhaps not as lyrically diverse as most of his recent work, it contains all the elements that make a good Lil B tape. From the obvious Prince sample and karaoke stylings of “Fed Time,” the lo-fi sibilance of “Le Miserabel” to the sinister cooking swag of “Bitch In the City” (which offers some of the most obscure and random ad libs ever uttered in hip hop history). This is a Lil B tape, so most people know what to expect. Lyrically, White Flame sees him a little more influenced by his love for Cash Money era New Orleans rap, and at times he even sounds like BG reciting his lyrics at a Screwed Up pace. Someone recently commented to this reviewer that McCartney’s delivery sounds as though he is always rapping over a different beat, and that description is apt. Lil B, who is often accused of being off-tempo, rarely falls off beat. He just seems to have found that unknown metronome that MF DOOM has spoken about.

Download Lil B’s White Flame (Click Here)

Zelooperz – Coon ‘N the Room (2011) [Self-Released] // Grade: B+

First dude to randomly hit me up on twitter and impress me. I played the first song ont he album not knowing what to expect at all, and heard a dude that was kinda like Childish Gambino, then it hits the 50 second mark and dude’s true self comes out. Coon ‘N the Room is testament album. It’s “don’t look back raps”. This is what it sounds like when a young man in America intertwines his life with his music, and goes for broke. I dont’ know Zelooperz too well, but given the sound of his music I’d guess he’s a somewhat frustrated dude. It’s not a difficult feat in 2012 as a young man. The previous generation had a path that isn’t available to us, but we’re expected to outperform them. We’re expected to live lives filled with leaping bounds, but we all got prescribed cement shoes. So, instead of soaring through the clouds of American personal achievement a dude like Zelooperz gives us Coon ‘N the Room: 17 tracks of cement shoes kickin’ holes in the walls and smashin’ wack rappers’ faces to smithereens.

For a dude this young (he’s 18) what would you expect of him if he were, say working at a Best Buy? Would you expect him to be working on the floor? In the stockroom? At a register? Managing a department? Working with the geek squad? Based on what I heard on here dude is much more like regional management. The homie Catf1sh likened him to Big Sean. I can hear that. There is a similarity to the intonation, and the syncopations of Ze’s flow and Big Sean’s. But Big Sean is more like a commercial for a Maybach that you’re supposed to watch in awe (not happening), while Zelooperz is a dude whippin’ a C43 AMG and inviting you along for the ride. The thing they have in common is the thing that Ze does way better than Sean. Without trying, duh. He’s a natural.

Say you had a chef who made amazing Indo-Mexican fusion food. And that chef had an Indian dad, and a Mexican mom it would be pretty obvious where the inspiration for the crazy fusion food came from. But, with rap the constellation of influencers is still too diffused to even begin to see it. So, for a dude like Zelooperz who is very obviously blessed with a gift for rapping, where do you look to understand it? I don’t know. I’d like to think that one day I’ll have a better explanation for this stuff, but for now the explanation is all in the music. I’d suggest you take the time to really listen to what dude is saying, and try to figure out why he’s saying as well as what he’s telling us. It’s very obvious that the mind behind this stuff is both complex and observant. And so it’s no surprise that the music that comes out is both nuanced and forceful. Zelooperz understands how to flip back and forth between styles and not only paint a picture, but fill the room with movement. Keep a very, very close eye on this dude because he has everything he needs to do everything he wants, and he’s very very driven.