Celestaphone: Paper Cut From the Obit (Drumhex, 2023)
October 8, 2023 at 6:09 pm | Posted in Reviews | Leave a comment
Celestaphone: Paper Cut From the Obit
Celestaphone’s music stretches past the boundaries of hip-hop, to the point where
his latest basically ends up feeling like a prog-rock album with a heavy jazz-funk influence. Playful pianos, elastic grooves, and morphing, thought bubble-like keyboard blips detail the vivid sound beds for terminally online word salad. The tracks often flow into each other, creating surprising beat switches and genre dovetails, like the BBQ/pool party-ready funk near-instrumental “Day”, while some of the lyrics (including a Mac Dre reference early on) and Celestaphone’s flows clearly mark out his lineage in the pantheon of West Coast hip-hop. Still, the music is gleeful jazz-prog and even post-punk rather than G-funk. The knotty synth-funk instrumental “Nay” dissolves into the woozy scientific terror-dream “Paintings of Panspermia”, and tucked away near the end of the album is one of the hardest Moor Mother verses I’ve ever heard (on a track with Armand Hammer, no less), and an entire song where Paul Barman bursts with joy about how much he loves babies. A really surprising and fun LP where sarcasm bleeds into celebration as we’re taken on a ride down a twisting, non-obvious path.
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