Vital Status: Alive & Well❤️
Analogy: You fell asleep into a nightmare that pushes you through blood curdling scenarios
Genre: Experimental Hip Hop
Length: 53min
Experimental hip hop group Clipping. is back with their new album Visions of Bodies Being Burned. This album is the successor of There Existed an Addiction to Blood and pretty much a part 2.
To get straight to the point this is a horror album and the timing of its release falls perfectly in line with the Halloween spirit. If you’re familiar with There Existed an Addiction to Blood (Clipping’s 3rd album) your getting a lot of the same horror themes but just ramped up. The sounds on this record are truly menacing and throw you directly in to a world of cults, spirits, swamps, paranoia, and to put it lightly dreadful vibes overall.
Clipping. leads off with an intro that puts the listener right into a suspenseful moment with what sounds like heavy footsteps increasing until everything just explodes. We are now captured in Clippings. horrific world and tumbling threw this project. On the next track, “Say the Name”, they use lyrics from Geto Boys “My Mind Is Playing Tricks on Me“, that lyric being “Candle sticks in the dark, vision of bodies being burned”. This is a murder/killer track with references to Candyman and an ending of like noise rock and electronic combination that’s pretty sweet.
“96′ Neve Campbell” follows up referencing more horror tropes from the movie Scream and what Clipping. has said to be a final girl moment in horror films. Cam & China feature on this pretty much carrying the song while delivering bad ass versus that coincide with the chorus of “this bitch boss”.
Clipping. doesn’t just stop at murderers/killers but add in zombies on the next track of “Something Underneath”. Just imagine the beginning or coming of a zombie apocalypse. What comes nicely after this is the song”Make Them Dead” that has cult/ brainwashed vibes all around it. Daveed Diggs has said that this song is kind of about right-wing ideas and the cult like attitude behind them in an interview with Anthony Fantano around 36:47.
Clipping. does use some interludes on this to reinforce the overall them with “Wytchboard”, “Invocation”, and “Drove”. These interludes are fine nothing special and short enough to not interrupt anything. One is about a Ouija board, the other has a high pitch ringing tone, and finally some goats making noise.
At this point we are nearly halfway through and we get “Pain Everyday” that has some brutal lyrics. What really draws me into this song is the ending that turns into almost a final moment of life feeling, with strings and glitchy noises coming in on the instrumental to add a sorrow to the beat that was so harsh earlier. It has a finality too of real death that lingers with you.
If you like a good paranoid song “Check the Lock” covers all the grounds here with the main character doing over the top or frantic actions to ease his mind, which inevitably fails.
On some of the later tracks “Looking Like Meat” may not do it for some listeners especially with Ho99o9 featured. The chorus here is slick with testing people on how “hard” they really are. I enjoy the alliteration on some bars such as
Crypt keeper Crip walking where thе feet are lit
Blood drinker Blood talking when you see the blick
Two of my favorite tracks come at the end of this album with “Eaten Alive” and “Enlacing”. “Eaten Alive” immediately sounds like you were thrown into a swamp. Daveed’s cold, braggadocios, and direct “fuck you” lyrics are right in your face. These coincide with the swamp theme and he does a really cool thing by equating trap and bling rap ideologies with swamp ascetics which is just fantastic.
Pop a band up out the bando, ’bout a half a week
Pimpin’ partners lock it down, they feel like Master P
And you ain’t in the trap house ‘less you got a master key
The rims are 30″ here because the grass is deep
Gold on his molars ’cause he only got ’bout half his teeth
I think some of the coldest bars also on this are
You passing through to spread your gospel, you gon’ have to leave
Wrapped up in a casket are the only ones the pastor sees
With “Enlacing” we get a completely drugged out song which I can only explain like the feeling of melting and then reshaping and then melting again. I suggest listening to this really loud because it can just swarm you and all the little sounds matter on this with everything going on. The lyrics on this follow suite with drug use and trying to gain some form of control but just losing it as well.
We end with a performance piece just like on the previous album. Clipping. uses Yoko Ono’s “Secret Piece” to bring some sense of calm into the picture after everything that has transpired. It’s very meditative and a nice way to conclude.
It may be pretty clear that I loved this project. It had everything that I was never looking for. The sounds, the lyrics, it all put me into a horrific world where you woke up like it was a dream.
Albums Are Dead💀 