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MH-230 cLOUDDEAD - Ten  Ten finds cLOUDDEAD building on all of the elements that defined their debut: razor sharp vocal interplay, quirky found sound samples, ambient drone dreamscapes, lyrics that walk the line between observational and confessional, and a fair share of nosdam drums slowed to a growl. Doseone and why? never take the cheap way out. Their lyrics may range from blurry and buried to sharp and surfaced, but each and every line has meaning. The music and production are collaborative, featuring Doseone's knack for bottling emotion, why's self-taught multi-instrumentalist efforts, and odd nosdam's flair for borrowed genius. Individually, Doseone, why? and odd nosdam are as prolific and fearless as anyone in today's new music scene, but together as cLOUDDEAD they are able to create music that captures all of the promise of their individual talents in an unequaled sound. |
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| Reviews Summary |
| All must hail - BBC / A brilliant swan song - CMJ / Genuinely Original - Uncut / Catchy and Sublime - Under The Radar / Unquestionably, cLOUDDEAD have arrived - Pitchfork / It's golden. - Magnet / Original and eccentric - Alarm / Its merits are aplenty and deep - Flyer / Strident and sophisticated - Grooves / Uniquely promising and satisfying - Stylus |
| Traversing the outer-outer-limits of hip-hop, indie-pop, ambient introspection and blender solos, cLOUDDEAD's 2001 debut was that proverbial other-other-shit. Follow-up Ten focuses their sonic splatter-paintings into demented, eight-track-decimating "pop" songs which - although blender solos still present - is Another Green World entirely. Nasal abstract machinegun Doseone, basemental mini-Beck why? and Negativland-meets-Schooly D sampleslayer odd nosdam make melancholy noise that reflects their art-school backgrounds and love of Boards of Canada, dream-Kraut noisesters Flying Saucer Attack and golden-era hip-hop - all the time whacking Styrofoam for bass-drum sounds, building melodies around skipping records and gleaning samples from fleamarket tape spools. Schizophrenic rhythmic whispers and staccato Burroughsian ejaculations abound ("Yo! Two small girls and a haaaandful of dressed men / They walk a cage full of goats 'cross a B-ball court / Goats with a rectangular iris," is just the tip of the Doseberg), but as cLOUDDEAD's members will attest, the album's contents are poetry with beats as supporting columns, not musical beat poetry. A brilliant swan song; um, a dead swan without rectangular irises nor a strawberry in its throat. - CMJ |
