Chris DeLine

Anyone with any remote sense of what’s going on in hip hop knows that El-P’s March release I’ll Sleep When You’re Dead is one of the decade’s most innovative and essential releases within the genre. That being said Christian Hoard, one of the cheeky aficionado’s at Rolling Stone, concluded “If you’re into nodding your head and scratching your head at the same time, Dead is for you.” Though, how much weight can you put behind that statement seeing as though he gave Ys, one of last years most daring albums (not my style, but I respect its artistic dare), the following one sentence review, “Newsom is a classically trained harpist and singer who made a very good 2004 record, but this EP is hard to stomach: Five tracks, four of them more than nine minutes and one (”Only Skin”) sixteen-plus, with meandering strings-and-things accompaniment and indulgent vocal quirks that make Bjork sound like Kelly Clarkson.” Ipso facto: El-P is hot.

[This post was first published by Culture Bully.]