You Should Hear… Deep Puddle Dynamics

You Should Hear… Deep Puddle Dynamics

November 16, 2011 · by wabray · in ,

…And in particular, this album, 1999′s The Taste of Rain… Why Kneel?

I am relatively new to the hip-hop genre. Growing up, I blindly hated all hip-hop and rap, for a lot of really dumb reasons. I was under the impression that if something did not have guitars, basses, and singing, it could not be music. (This is also the reason I hated the White Stripes for a while; no bass.) Most of the rap I was exposed to was the stuff I heard on mainstream radio, which to this day I still cannot stand. I also did not actually listen to lyrics until I was roughly 17.

Luckily, I have seen the errors of my way. I still am nowhere near an expert in hip-hop, but I have grown to love it. Especially good hip-hop, which is exactly what this album is. 3 of premier underground label Anticon’s founders make up the group; Sole, Doseone, and Alias, along with Slug (known primarily from Atmosphere.) With that formation, you should know to expect something unconventional, abstract, and hard-hitting, and you will not be disappointed.

This is not a party album. It’s not a cd you’d put on and dance to. This is an album designed to make you think. The first song of the album, “Deep Puddle Theme Song,” sets the standard for the rest of what you are going to hear. There is no normal logic to the way the verses are set up. Some of them are 4 lines long, some are only 2, a couple are 8. They switch back and forth between members, mesmerizing you with the way their voices work together. Towards the middle of the song, Slug begins to chant “I took a dip last week through the liquid that gathered/Near the tip of the peak that exists in my matter/I taught myself to survive with my feet on the ground/I never felt so alive until I drowned.”  This is repeated on and off throughout the rest of the song, sometimes rapped by other members of the group, sometimes rapped sotto voce underneath other verses.

The album goes on in the same vein from there, with heavy songs like “Where the Wild Things Are,” about a serial killer facing his inner demons, mixed in with a little bit more hopeful songs like “June 26th, 1998″ which ponders the meaning of life. One of my favorite tracks is “Rainmen” in which the group bemoans the current state of hip-hop. The song opens with the line “I’ll take 7 MC’s, put ‘em in a line, shoot ‘em and sell their clothes to get my wisdom teeth pulled…” It is this kind of unconventional, darkly humorous lyrics that make me love Deep Puddle Dynamics so much.

All the tracks on this album excellent. A few of them may take a couple listens to truly appreciate, but once you grow accustomed to the Deep Puddle style, you’ll never go back.

 

By: Will Bray

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