El-P makes music when he is inspired to make it. Fantastic Damage broke loose back in 2002. I’ll Sleep When You’re Dead came to the scene in 2007. His new album did not properly hit the scene until this year (2012). Even after all of those years passing by, nothing much changes. Cancer 4 Cure, like his previous albums, catches El-P being what he will always be: forever not compromising, forever not commercializing, and forever not contriving.

 

The music on this album remains as experimental, and evasive, as ever. “The Full Retard” gives us a track that would make The Bomb Squad proud. “Drones Over Brooklyn”, with its crooning epilogue, only continues the instrumental madness that is called “music”. “Stay Down” only ensures that people understand where people like Skrillex and SBTRKT got their dubstep sound from. Musically, EL-P still remains daringly different.

 

Even more notable are the lyrics that El-P always tends to ingeniously put together. One find example is “The Jig Is Up”, where he questions a flirty female with inquiries like “Who signs when you submit receipts?/ What do they have on you to bribe you?/ What’s the threat they held above that very pleasing face?/ What do they want from me?”. “True Story” with wide-eyed hopelessness for life and society, states “Stuck on mega lit blocks, feathered tarred and detoxed/ From the sox to the cochlear tied up tethered and boxed/ Just a Helena with legs, framing the painting of dregs/ Fuck your complaining/ I’m fresh/ I’m tainted pain in the flesh/ I’ll see you”. The average listener would think he is just throwing words together. However, many of his fans understand the method to the manic madness that is El-P’s rhymes.

 

Musically aggressive, yet orderly with a penchant for patchwork lyrical dramatics full of deeper meaning, Cancer 4 Cure is not the average album for the average hip hop listener. No, you don’t need to read the liner notes of a Gang Starr album like one foolish mortal wrote. However, you have to listen and ingest his music. This is not music for those that don’t take time to “marinate the meat”. This music is only for those that want to go against the grain of what music is supposed to be. Realizing this gives true meaning behind the “cancer” for the “cure”.

 

 

Album review submitted by contributing writer, Mark A. Harris.