Prolyphic & Reanimator - "The Ugly Truth"

Prolyphic & Reanimator - Dick and Jane (feat. Macromantics) (Removed by request) (Strange Famous 2008)

Prolyphic & Reanimator - The Ugly Truth / Strange Famous

Since there's no use ignoring the elephant in the room, let's get it right out there and say that Strange Famous gives away what kind of record this is, so this review will make no bones about being short and to the point. Sage Francis, the man behind the label, urged Providence-based MC Prolyphic to work with Windy City beatmaker Reanimator over three years ago. The collaboration was so successful that the two became the first members of the Strange Famous label.

Unfortunately, making The Ugly Truth was far less smoothly successful: The reason this album has taken three years to form is largely due to three crashed hard drives of valuable material, re-recordings of vocals, remixings of songs, anything that could quantitatively slow an album down seemed to fall the way of these two cats. It's enough to get anyone incensed.

Prolyphic might have been an edgy character before (which is what initially got him noticed), but he's spittin' mad on this album now. Prolyphic & Reanimator have built one of the most vital indie hip-hop records of the year on a premise of anger that sounds like the inverse of, say, the Clipse: While the brothers Thornton wax caustically disinterested over coked out beats when their albums hit trouble, Prolyphic comes out with furious passion and Reanimator concocts maximal beats honed on past Francis albums like 2002's memorable Personal Journals and last year's Human the Death Dance. "Broken Bottles" and "Born Alone" open up the album with breathless rhymes that barely stop for air.

This dense style is what characterizes so much of independent hip-hop today: By sacrificing futuristic club beats or ridiculously inane Urban Dictionary catchphrases for serious (and often self-serious) floetry with generic bargain bin funk beats, it's easy for artists to fall into the perilous pigeonhole of backpacker. In some ways, The Ugly Truth lands a direct hit for social responsibility and brooding over the state of any inanimate object or concept within a ten-foot radius. "No time for punchlines / That's why I'm bitter," right there in "Survived Another Winter."

But "Survived Another Winter" (and "Artist Goes Pop," for that matter) is also a demonstration of why this record does more than merely lament societal indifference at the plight of the poor. This is also a personal journal of Prolyphic's own, a peek into the psyche of two dudes who have had this record brewing inside them for three years. What would the difference have been had they not lost those hard drives and put this out at the tail-end of the climax over Rhymesayers and Anticon?

That's not for us to answer. All we know for sure is what The Ugly Truth delivers: a solid hip-hop album that pulls no punches during its extended 58-minute run-time. If there was one complaint, it would be that the truth takes so long to get out... But sometimes you've got to delve just that little bit deeper just that little bit longer to get the ugliest bits out. In that light, Prolyphic & Reanimator's debut is a resounding success. It doesn't get much more honest than this.