Anti Pop Consortium: Arrhythmia : Music Reviews : Rolling Stone

Album Reviews

Mainstream hip-hop is so full of alpha males and materialistic posturing that it's easy to forget it's got a nerdy side it's trying to hide. But here's the Anti-Pop Consortium -- a revenge of the underground hip-hop nerds, if you will. As a reaction to the watered-down R&B regurgitation of mainstream hip-hop, APC are an unparalleled, post-modern music force to be reckoned with in any context. Arrhythmia, their second full-length outing, finds MCs High Priest, Beans, M. Sayyid and producer Earl Blaize abstracting and reconstructing a vast sound smorgasbord from the processed and natural sound world in their own iconoclastic image. As manifestos go, they don't come any more biting or succinct than the skit "Tron Man Speaks," in which a robotic voice chastises an FM R&B DJ for his musical myopia. APC's rhyme-production-imagination synergy is showcased on the aptly named "Ping Pong," which is built upon a beat of sampled ping pong balls before layers of rhyme and a loose-limbed drum track take over the proceedings. Anti-Pop Consortium are the musical equivalents of the kids at the back of the class snickering when the teacher stumbled over an answer because they knew it before the question was asked.

CHRIS HANDYSIDE
(April 2, 2002)