Mansbestfriend - "Poly.sci.187"

Mansbestfriend - Stuck in My Head Since I Was 12 (Anticon. 2007)

Mansbestfriend - Poly.sci.187 / Anticon.

You know it, we know it, the blogosphere knows it: Lately we've been having a lot of rock records pass through the humble headquarters of Audiversity. While that's all very well and good for guitar-attuned ears, those of us more into the floetry side of things have gone hungry. Mansbestfriend is a step in that direction, but hold your horses there, slayer: As with any Anticon. release, it couldn't be just that straightforward. So Poly.sci.187 woozily stumbles in with an Emma Goldman quotation; you know straight away the title was no misnomer. What follows is typical of Tim Holland's clever knack for putting the right beats in the right places.

You'll get spoken-word bits in and out of the album, but it's the production that takes center-stage on this album. The prog-hop sensibilities speak to something larger than just Holland's wizardry behind the boards, though: This is clearly a political album. Whatever political science courses you pretended to take in college are out the window with Mansbestfriend, because this album doesn't occupy any kind of overt spots in the consciousness. Instead, Holland (whom I've somehow neglected to mention is Sole during his day job) caters to the cerebral, filling songs with noise-collage samples, vacant beats, E-bows and organs, ethereal vocals... This never really feels like a hip-hop album, actually. Instead, it feels more like a less menacing Dälek record: There's a lesson to be learned from the music, but it's not explicitly stated.

Well, not always. The Goldman snippet aside, "Spin the Humans" starts off with a little lad named William from Lebanon. It ends with a "Wheel of Fortune" clip, but the best part here is that while we can be pretty certain Holland is, erm, less than conservative, he lets you do the deciding for yourself. That's what might be the most rewarding part of this album: There's no lecturing, there's no instructions on what to think, and there are no answers. There are only questions posed in musical form. It's up to the listener to decide how to answer them. Interestingly, a parallel can be drawn to political post-rockers, say From Monument to Masses or even Godspeed You! Black Emperor. It's not quite as heavy-handed, but the point is the same.

For the hip-hop heads still wondering what happened to all the empty promises of that opening paragraph, "Allieverwanted" will fill your needs quite nicely. The vocals are totally swamped by the noisy electronics and analog wanderings that surround a steadfast beat unafraid to bang big. "Stuck in My Head Since I Was 12" follows it and does just as excellent a job of staying loyal to the beats of the grittiest rhymers. Freestyling over a track will never feel so forward-thinking.

There are a ton of other fly beats on here, and that's really my only complaint: That at 16 tracks it's a bit difficult to really wrap yourself up in any of these songs because they never last long enough. The only reason this is unfortunate is because so many of them deserve a little fleshing out, to see where they go. "High Noon and Sobered" is one example, "Firefish" another, "How Big is Space" yet another... The list goes on. It's just one awesome snapshot after another, and while it's the album's Achilles Heel, it's also it's greatest asset: Holland may not be telling you what to think, but he is suggesting how you should feel. Namely, unsettled.

Anticon. is a reliable label, but with Mansbestfriend they've recaptured some of the essence of what they were about. Before Thee More Shallows, before all those Alias remixes, there was Sole and a left-field hip-hop collective he was associated with that wanted to do more than merely rhyme. Poly.sci.187 speaks to that and to the future of a genre that's been hit-or-miss in recent months. Politically speaking: Consider this a direct hit.