BUSDRIVER AND RADIOINACTIVE WITH DEADELUS
THE WEATHER
Let's take a trip to that special place of selectively repressed memories that was high school. Think of the back row of AP English class and you'll remember a handful of misfits in the sea of aspirations: class clowns, well read hippies, and basements DJs. Now to make the thought experiment more fun, we'll take a representative sample from the aforementioned population and lock them in your parents' well padded basement with a crate of frosted flakes, a half kilo of endo, and a beat up tape recorder.
Chances are over the course of a long weekend this misplaced trio will have recorded either the complete works of Shakespeare or The Weather, but unless they collaborated with a crack team of precocious chimp typists, I'd bet my box of Pop Tarts on the latter.
The Weather developed from "Somethingness," a momentary collaboration with Radioinactive on Busdriver's Temporary Forever. Busdriver and Radioinactive blow off their rhymes fast enough to induce arrhythmia in the weak of heart while Daedelus' beats fly high with singed wings. Think Beck circa Odelay, dropped as a baby and cloned twice and you might conceive of the catchiness of freely associated trains of thought shaken and stirred by blip-hop break beats.
Dig the minimalist jazz of "Raffle Ticket blues' as bus and Radio spit "Happy B-day/ Here's a candle/ a ginger beer and a new pair of sandals/ I like to travel/ and I like my eggs scrambled/ smoking hash with the man/ with broken legs in Istanbul." The Weather takes poetry to a land where our beloved bard wouldn't dare to flex his iambics.
Opening with the rhetorical refrain, "Are you ready to lose your virginity?" "Exaggerated Joy" strikes like a nine-iron to the cranium, as the synchronized schizophrenics jam on their electo-funk machines. Thirty-seconds in and you'll either want to burn copies of this CD for all your friends or burn your copy of this CD for the sake of humanity.
Love em' or hate em' you gotta at least respect em', as The Weather secretes the joy juice of creativity from itself ever pore. "Glorified hype Man" chronicles the demise of America's favorite Boy Band, The Weather, in a jubilant plug for shameless self-promotion. The Eurotrash anthem, "Weather Locklear," find Radio turn play street psychiatrist as he dispenses advice, "Sounds like you've got some problems/ you need to smoke pot with goblins" over loops of cheesy Latin music du jour. Daedelus showcases his Tigerbeat6 polished computer pranks and stacks of wax courtesy of an FAO Schwartz clearance sale on "Name Forgetter" unleashes' while Bus and Radio play the ever popular children's game of bragging.
The album closes with "Barely Music," and Circus sums up The Weather: "You're stupid for believing that this was really music, except it really isn't. It's just glopety gloop. It's just poo poo. It's gloopety goo. It's glopety gunk, or however you spell that shit." In other words, it's good shit.
SHAUNAK DEEPAK