Vinyl Frontier Records

Reviews:

Creation through destruction is the operative line of attack on this New Jersey trio's fourth full-length. "Distorted Prose" illustrates the ever-widening gulf between music and message: D"alek pits himself as "a bastard child of Reaganomics posed in a B-boy stance" in the song's opening lines, while the sinister sonic backdrop (courtesy of producer Oktopus and DJ Still) crashes against the MC's pan-African message with hurricane force. As with 2002's too hot to handle From Filthy Tongues of Gods and Griots, anything that might conspire to ease D"alek into more conventional hip-hop territory is thrust to the back of the mix on Absence. The trio's sound eschews easy descriptors; D"alek's three headstrong-and increasingly iconoclastic musicians-travel in completely different orbits, and its sound owes everything to the fact that the passions of its individual members barely gel.

From a purely hip-hop perspective, D"alek embodies whatever's waiting at the subway station beyond Bomb Squad-style production and the RZA's baroque sonic tapestries. Dig into "Asylum (Permanent Underclass)" for the best example of what happens when the component parts clash and the sound swells into horizon-expanding cacophony. But Absence, like the records that preceded it, also suggests a conscious attempt to pull hip-hop out of the moment and strip it of its essentials. And on tracks like "K"oner," an ambient bridge that draws heavily on the group's recent collaboration with krautrock elders Faust, any last vestiges of the hip and the hop are sucked straight out. With that many fingers stirring the pot, the possibilities seem limitless.