L.A. U.T.I.

One of the drawbacks of the supposed Golden Age of hip-hop is that as the music became increasingly commercially successful, a lot of the really weird stuff that burbled around the fringes of the style in the early '80s--oddball epics like The Jonzun Crew's Vocoder-driven LP Lost In Space and one-off novelties like Coati Mundi's "Me No Pop I" (a Caribbean hip-hop single by the musical director of Kid Creole and the Coconuts)--disappeared as people realized there was bigger money to be had. Black Moth Super Rainbow mastermind Tobacco revisits that world where underground rappers have the freedom to experiment with this 19-minute remix companion to his second solo album Maniac Meat. Harder-edged and far more rhythm-oriented than Tobacco's BMSR work, Maniac Meat was already most of the way towards being fine edgy hip-hop beats: indeed, "Lick the Witch" and "Sweatmother" have Rob Sonic and Height (respectively) dropping rhymes over Tobacco's otherwise-untouched instrumental tracks. Adding a uniformly strong selection of rappers, from Doseone's slurred, druggy delivery of "The Injury" to the heavily-processed cartoon voices of Icicle Frog's "Unholy Demon Rhythms," both highlights the otherworldly strangeness of Tobacco's music (made largely with vintage analogue equipment being pushed past its limits) and, arguably, makes it more approachable to listeners who might find unfiltered Tobacco too strong for them.