LET’S BE honest, hip hop has gone stale these last couple of years...very stale. With the return of indie guitar bands, hip hop has retreated to the margins in a mind numbing orgy of bling and clichéd beats.
Where is the innovation, daring, audacity, and controversy that made hip hop so exciting for so long? An act which still embodies and pursues those qualities is New Jersey’s Dälek, who plays Strange Brew in the Róisín Dubh on Thursday November 27 at 9pm.
Dälek is an MC and producer and he is backed by producer and DJ Oktopus. Together they have been flying the flag for hip hop by creating challenging and imaginative rap music.
Dälek began MCing and Djing in the late 1980s and hooked up with Oktopus in the mid 1990s. They undermine every idiom of mainstream rap, choosing instead to blend hypnotic rhymes with a corrosively atmospheric, electronica-inflected hard rock sensibility - combined with a lyrical intelligence and social realism.
Their music has earned huge critical acclaim. “Instead of creating a sense of intimidation through overpowering samples and sheer brute force, they realise it through a cinematic eeriness and minimalist disquiet,” said Dusted. Spin.com described their music as “ambient noise recalling that of Mogwai is hip-hopified a la Public Enemy.”
The pair remained an underground phenomenon until their fourth album Absence (2005 ) brought them to national press attention. Further critical acclaim and public recognition was gained by 2007’s Abandoned Language.
“We’ve been making wall of noise records for a long time and I think with Absence we realised that was as far as we wanted to go with that sound,” said Dälek. “The new one is about composition and notes we are playing...but the more you listen to it the more f****d up you realise it is.”
Sounds too good to miss.
Tickets are available from the Róisín Dubh and Zhivago. See also www.myspace.com/dalek
