The Album Club: "I'll Sleep When You're Dead" by EL-P
 

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Last one in round three people. Discuss, rate, comment and review here.

I am undecided how to vote, it is a toss up between Like or Meh. If I vote Meh, it not because I am apathetic to the album. It is because all the plus and minuses even out. I've listen to the album from beginning to end last week. Read along with the lyrics for the first couple of songs. I think the guy has talent. I like his flow, and his rhyming. It was old school. But some things in his lyrics I didn't care for, really really didn't care for. Some of the music was excellent on the album. A few song had sounds that I thought didn't work. One was some kind of corny synths or samples or whatever, but it takes away from an already decent backing track. The other with steady gun fire which I didn't care for. I don't think I will listen to this album again on own out of the club.

rating: 3/5

*EL-P, not EI-P

This was my introduction to El-P. I copped this record a solid decade ago. Tasmanian Pain Coaster, Smithereens, Poisoneville Kids,The Overly Dramatic Truth, Drive. So many great tracks! LOVE IT!

Good lookin' out Trollheart!

This is better than Cancer 4 Cure and everybody deep down knows it

It's quite a lot better of course. His best album in fact.

Poisenville Kids No Wins / Reprise [This Must Be Our Time]



This is the sound of what you don't know, killing you
This is the sound of what you don't need, still true
This is the sound of what you don't want, still in you

Never again

When a live wire lights
Little metal rail: right
Where a marvel of engineering steered me clear into the plight
Right before the bodegas open
After the peak of night
Before the paper's delivered
I sat on the corner and sparked a light
The same corner I perched when I zone dropped on the block first
At almost 5 o'clock watching for sun spots and store clerks
A lone spot
It was kinda like the zone was forgot
As if the grid had been reset and couldn't catch to the clock
Or the stoop was stuck in the past a half minute
And I sat in it
With a loosie Newpy drift out of my lips
Taste: half minted

Come on

And I felt like a hundred bucks in the pocket of a gambling lush
At a wondershowzen flow with the droids of destructo luck
Fugitoid on the run again
The sky gleamed the maroonish coloring
Layered against the bluest tone from where the thunder lived
And here I was directly under it
Like some dejected little grey they told to stay and wait for the mothership
A cotton ball in a blizzard of mischief
A brain prison
With a thought that rode on the bus and came for conjugal visits
And fucked its way into my gray matter
The tattered territory
Stayed chattering and nagging till it demanded it yell it for me
And I tried to hold the thing back
But the meditation was otherly
Fixated on what a friend said and relating it to my struggling
Metropoloid void so damn smothering
But we were children of Poisenville and saw the seduction less repugnant
And reserved the right as the triggerman with the back-up plan of self destruction
And I touched the type of chemicals that could pull me towards that function
It's the stuff I find hard for discussion
How the fuck do you explain your own self destruction and still remain trusted?

Come on

To answer the question: yes
The city wants you gone
And that’s the only thing connecting us
But the connection is so strong
So how dare you assume that I'll sleep when you're dead?
This is well outside the boundaries of acceptable behavior
I will not give you the go ahead
And you will not be remembered fondly
I'm throwing down the gauntlet
And fuck you
This isn't your decision
And for all the holy fuck I give
Your little spectacle is ended
But don't think for just one second you've honored your obligations to me
I'm serious
Look in my eyes
I don't find this funny
Or whatever you imagine poetry and justice feels like when you combine them
I am not going to allow this on my watch, buddy
Nobodies impressed with your imagined sacrifice device or insurmountable regret
You are not uniquely pained and if you go we won't be sorry
And who the hell are you to put me through the banality of watching this?
Cuz many better men have gone for clearly better reasons
And I starkly must remind you that you have not even been trying
And that's the only thing remarkable about you
Stop me if I'm lying

We are always outnumbered
But we were never out militia’d
There's no dignity for criminals
No ministry for the wicked
In this town, if you make a sound, you're the leper with the most fingers
The League of Extraordinary Nobodies
The other team’s bringing in ringers
No faith in the majority
No hope for the little ones
Sally pulled a pistol out
Billy got a blunderbuss
So what the fuck are you feeling that makes your struggle so wondrous?
Enough to arrogantly pull what's left of the rug out from under us?
I think not
You're in the same barrel
All us other crabs are caught
And if I have to live, you have to live
Whether you like this shit or not

Never again

Come on

Dedicated to the drowning and the noble futility of the desperate friends forced to watch

Never again

And to my good friends who refused to allow it to happen to me

Never again

You know who you are
You know what I'm talking about

Never again

Believe me, man
I promise

Never, never, never gonna get that way again



If you can't appreciate this, then I pity you.

I wanted to love this because I love Run the Jewels, but I'm a music person first and a lyrics person like... third or fourth, honestly. I wish the songwriting and production was more varied. Not that it doesn't have some great moments, it's just obviously not the priority here. Unfotunately, that doesn't leave me much to return to.

Take some drugs, turn off the lights, lay down and listen to the album with your eyes closed. You'll get it.

El-P – I’ll Sleep When You’re Dead (2007)

Best Tracks: Up All Night, the League of Extraordinary Nobodies, Habeas Corpus ( Draconian Love)

Weakest Tracks: Dear Sirs, Run the Numbers

Another Hip-Hop album though in somewhat of a different style than Open Mike Eagle. I found this album more enjoyable. I thought there were some pretty nice uses of sampling. I was still trying to place the sample on Drive and now I remember where I had heard something similar, Fatboy Slim’s Weapon of Choice (I assume that too was also a sample).

I liked the music especially. I tend to pay less attention to the lyrics unless the language is especially crude or violent. I don’t think this album crossed the line there.

I really liked the line in Habeas Corpus (I found love on a prison ship). El-P seems to be demented at time in a Weird Al sort of way I guess. Overall, there were really no tracks that I would call absolute classics, but the poorer tracks aren’t the worst I’ve heard either. In other words, the album is fairly consistent.

I bounced from giving this album a 6 or a 7 (I am saying I like it), but I really couldn’t decide whether the better parts rated or the lesser parts took the album down a little. So I’ll go halfway with my assessment.




6.5/10 (the Word has spoken :D)

The production/soniclandscape and beats are boss. The themes and lyrics are boss. The delivery is machine gun fire but static. His rapping is fierce but not dynamic. Unfortunately, that’s a significant drawback. 3/5

I am not sufficiently educated in the realm of hip-hop to make any critical judgment about El-P's proficiency as a rapper. Still, there were many elements I found intriguing about the recording. The album is filed under abstract and experimental hip-hop, and a perusal of his catalog reveals that El-P dabbles in avant-garde jazz and fusion as well. While I've never heard of El-P or Run the Jewels, by the third track I could see why the album is often shelved alongside leftfield veterans like DJ Shadow.

The instrumental hits and electronic samples have an abstract quality and frequently flirt with elements of jazz, hinting at everything from Donald ***en to Carlos Santana to Sugarhill which definitely kept my interest. Reviewers have described the album as complex and multi-layered, and those very qualities are what kept me listening.

The album's theme is dark and dystopian, which I expect resonates with listeners in the present-day Orwellian socio-political sphere. After a week of escaping into pastoral melodies, this record was a dramatic fist-kiss of reality.

8/10

I really genuinely enjoyed this album. I don't know much about the lyrics (as usual I didn't take much notice of them), but flow is superb and the beats are always very inspired and intriguing, as is to be expected of a DJ's album. I mean, it's nothing spectacular, I don't anyone will say it's the next Madvillainy or Illmatic, but it's still a great classic rap album in a time where well-produced rap albums are few and far between. 8/10

Wipers - Youth of America
El-P - I'll Sleep When You're Dead
The dB's - Stands for Decibels

it's infinitely better than Illmatic and I would have a hard time choosing between it and Madvillainy

1. Tasmanian Pain Coaster:



Ten on Ten on Ten. One of the great opening tracks. Sets the tone of the album perfectly, has several awesome beat changes and tone shifts. Stellar lyrically and Jamie does his thing on the boards.

2. Smithereens: I love the quirky intro that sounds like the theme music to some kinda 60's kids TV show, which morphs into a typically unusual Hip Hop beat. Not the strongest track on the album, but it's still great.

3. Up All Night: Legit banger and probably the most simple track on the album both thematically and in terms of production. But I find no faults.

4. EMG: Another track that starts with a quirky bit, this time some kind of advertisement. A lot of this track seems to deal with corporate greed and consumerism. I guess nobody is perfect. EL smashes it lyrically though, some amazing lines.

5. Drive: This is probably my least favourite track on the album. The whole "Drive, drive, drive" high pitched whatnot seems kinda too silly for my liking. He's still bringing it lyrically, but the track is kinda boring.

5. Dear Sirs: A quite serious departure from the previous track. Basically one verse over a brooding beat and it rocks.

7. Run the Numbers: The best track Aes and EL have done together. Period. Just pure rhymes and a badass beat.

8. Habeas Corpses (Draconian Love): Interesting concept well executed. Not the most interesting song but it works very well in this album.

9. The Overly Dramatic Truth: One of my favourite songs ever. I love every part of it. The production just hits that perfect place.

10. Flyentology: Not really a huge fan of this track to be honest. I think it would be better placed somewhere else on the album. Just seems a bit tame and robotic after the previous song.

11. No Kings: Similar to the previous song, this is a bit tinny and soulless in my opinion.

12. The League of Extraordinary Nobodies: Finally the album kicks back into the intergalactic totalitarian nightmare thematic production. That's why I love the album so much, and I wish all of the tracks felt this way.

13. Poisenville Kids No Wins / Reprise (This Must Be Our Time): EL doesn't have bad final tracks. There's no such thing. And this is dark and depressing thematically, and sonically.

10/10, even if it's not perfect.

El-P – I’ll Sleep When You’re Dead

Michael Jackson is the king of pop...and El-P is the kang of Beets. :dj:

The biggest thing going for El-P on this particular album is the sheer bleakness on display here. At times it feels like the next generation mixed race cousin to Skinny Puppy's Too Dark Park but with a sense of gallows humor and more accessibility / less chaos going on in the samples. This was a vision of authoritarian despair in a post-9/11 world and it sells this especially well on 'Habeas Corpses', 'Flyentology' and closer 'Poisenville Kids No Wins'.

This is one of those cases where I feel I like the album a lot more when I treat it as one "big" song, pessimistic snapshot that it is. When you break it down track to track it works a little less well, but the highlights were apparent. And even if you were in the small camp of people who hated this...well, there's always Run The Jewels.

8.5 out of 10

I don't really know what to say about this album. After that hip hop album from last week, which I liked quite a bit, this one brings me right back to my mental default setting regarding this genre: "This music is repetitive and I'm bored."

There are some very cool little production details here and there, the occasional neat melody, beat or bassline. Most of the time, it's just not terribly interesting or grabbing and I feel like I should be riding a pimped up vehicle with my arm out the window while listening to this, which is to say that it falls way too close to the sort of mainstream hip hop feel that I really quite dislike. Not that this album is bad, but it had just about a snowball's chance in hell of being up my alley.

The rapping itself is probably the main culprit. I can't find any way in which this guy is different from mainstream rappers like Jay Z (whom I dislike), so it just confirms my assumption that if I can learn to somewhat appreciate the genre, then it will have to be through artists that stay very far away from this particular type of rapping. The rapping itself feels like stereotypical mainstream "gangsta"-rap, just with some above averagely creative beats. Apologies to anyone here who is into the genre and offended by that statement.

I voted "meh", because that perfectly describes how most of this listening experience felt to me.

From the off, this is heavier and darker than the (admittedly little) hip-hop I've heard to date; almost a cross, at times, between metal and hip-hop. Very powerful certainly, quite dystopian in its way. Still has those staggered lines I hate, where the music seems to break up, and annoying jingles or something, but I feel (and I'm almost certainly completely wrong here) that this might be how Public Enemy sound? Meh, who knows, but it's good stuff. Some really good melodies, and, although as usual I don't tend to be able to make out much in the way of lyrics (or maybe I'm just not that bothered) it does all seem to be pretty dark material. Some great drumming on it, and I don't say that too often.

Annoying that it's not on Spotify so I had to YouTube it. There are some low points: "Drive" features that annoying squeaky voice that, for some reason, a lot of hip-hop artists seem to use, though the ending is quite funny. "Dear Sirs" is a little too angry for my tastes, gets pretty frenetic with some fine guitar though and "Run the Numbers" soon gets things back on a decent track. It seems just to maintain the high quality from here, and finishes really strongly with a bunch of great tracks - "The Overly Dramatic Truth", "Flyentology", "The League of Extraordinary Nobodies" and the powerful closer, "Poisenville Kids No Wins/Reprise (This Must Be Our Time)". Stellar stuff. A solid 9/10.