| In describing Edan’s sophomore album Beauty and the Beat, one is tempted to call it a hip-hop/psychedelia mash-up. In the same way that Danger Mouse seamlessly mixed The Grey Album years before, one can see the same motif happening in this record. Juxtapose unconditional music with fairly conditional rhymes and you get a genius album, right?
Well, no. If that were possible, then the dozen other Grey Album-knockoffs would have done something for DM’s cause instead of trivializing it with their poor execution and redundancy. This is an ambitious concept, and it requires someone with some pretty ambitious talent to pull it off. And Edan here is not a bad candidate. What he does on this record is make a hip-hop/psychedelia mash-up that doesn’t sound like a hip-hop/psychedelia mash-up. Instead it sounds like a record that transcends genre, music that ties together so many styles and influences and somehow doesn’t sound awkward or forced. This achievement alone warrants this album a listen, for hip-hop fans or otherwise, but there is still enough substance in the music that makes it worth listening to after the novelty value wears off.
The album opens with "Polite Meeting" a short but impressive intro that asks you to “listen to this” above a lush array of random instruments and samples. What is noticeable at first is the immense amount of instrumentation in this album. Beauty and the Beat’s sound is composed of endless horns, wind instruments, and lush guitar licks. Fleeting ambient sounds also come in and out of the music, creating an aesthetic that would probably have fit Sgt. Pepper’s decades earlier. For fans of complex, intricate music, Beauty and the Beat is certainly a must-listen. Few hip-hop albums, save for more traditional albums like The Foreign Exchange’s Connected, utilized such intricate instrumentation to make an undeniably unique and consistent sound. When "Funky Voltron" (feat. Insight) comes in, the lush, hypnotic sound is replaced with a heavy horn playing along with Insight’s harmonic rhymes. “What be the core but a solid foundation?/Skill, preparation/These sorts of things do a fine rapper make” raps Insight on the track. His voice and lyrics are fairly straight-forward. For those who know him from tracks on his record The Blast Radius might be disappointed with the lack of complexity in his rhymes, but in reality the raps on Beauty and the Beat exist to further Edan’s sonic experiment. While the rhymes occasionally feel too abrasive for the music, Edan overall does a good job in finding the right vocal accompaniments to his music.
The following track "See Colours" has Edan rhyming, “Prince Paul already used this loop/But imma keep it moving, and put you up on the scoop” over a beat that sounds like a subdued My Bloody Valentine. This track begins to expose a motif in this record’s about hip-hop. When Edan raps about, “giving praise to true scientists” on "Fumbling Over Words that Rhyme" he tips his hat to old-school hip-hop favorites. When he passes the mic to Percee P on "Torture Chamber" and Insight again on a later track, he allows them a chance to rap surrealist battle rhymes over equally lavish beats. While the production here sounds about as hip-hop as cLOUDDEAD, the aesthetic are strangely very traditional. Everything from Edan’s expressive voice to the slight social commentary on "Murder Mystery" read like typical hip-hop, but the production is so intensely original that the album resonates as a much greater achievement, and a much more ambitious project, than a typical rap CD.
The standout track is Mr Lif on "Making Planets" where his rhymes build up to a perfect crescendo accompanied by incredibly well-placed instrumentation; a type of dramatic effect difficult to find in any music, hip-hop or otherwise. “Rolling with the big gang of bothers with fangs/Mega dope, use a telescope to peep at my slang” is followed by easily the best sample on the entire record, a short vocal that leads the track out into the trippy "Time Out (Seque)".
"Rock and Roll", the following track, has Dagha rapping about rock music, name dropping anyone from Judas Priest to Frank Zappa to Jimi Hendrix. It’s a definite parallel to hip-hop on "Fumbling Over Words". Edan’s paying tribute to his influences in the most innovative way he can find. What makes "Rock and Roll" so catchy and fun to listen to is Edan’s cleverly-placed guitar samples. This, unlike most electric guitar ever used in hip-hop, sounds incredibly well-thought out. The type of dynamics created through tracks like "Rock and Roll" and the album in general is certainly something to behold.
The record continues in more tracks like "Beauty", "The Science of the Two" (feat. Insight), and "Smile". "Beauty" has Edan rhyming sporadically over string samples, "The Science of the Two" unfortunately is not nearly as impressive as the previous Insight track, and "Smile" drones the album out into the final track. The album’s ending, "Promised Land", features some of the most interesting rhymes from Edan and equally great samples and musical dynamics. Edan here raps, “My power settled the clash between races/And put good people on the magazine faces/Substituted television scandals with elephants and pandas,” and, “I slapped a 40 ounce out of a young man’s hand/And fed him lessons of life to formulate a plan/I wore the prime meridian as a wristband.” While these unconventional lyrics seem appropriate for Beauty’s eclectic soundtrack, Edan and friends don’t always deliver the same lyrical consistency. Tracks like "I See Colours" have Edan rhyming about sex and Percee-P raps about some pretty upsetting crimes on "Torture Chamber". Although more abstract lyrics may not have furthered Edan’s attempt to pay tribute to old-school rap, the kind of bizarre imagery on "Promised Land" worked extremely well with the music and the feeling of the album. Perhaps Edan should have expanded on this, at least conceptually.
Despite minor lyrical qualms, a few lackluster tracks like "The Science" and a fairly short running-time, Beauty and the Beat is an immensely innovative and gorgeous album. While Edan is no stranger to experimentation, Beauty took that to a whole new level, and he of all people deserves recognition for pushing the 2005 hip-hop envelope with such a strikingly original album. While probably not for fans of straight-up psychadelia (how many Beatles fans loved The Grey Album?), Edan’s Beauty and the Beat is for anyone with an open mind who wants to listen to one of the most genre-contorting, innovative album in years. Reviewed
by: vadger1
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