5 (or 6) years ago, I checked out two albums from experimental hip-hop group clipping, those being There Existed an Addiction to Blood and Visions of Bodies Being Buried in 2019 and 2020 respectively. Both were horror-themed hip-hop albums, and they were some of the best work I heard from the trio. Since then, they have been mostly quiet as a group. I know Daveed Diggs has a stable career on the silver and small screen, and I read the other two members have been doing some production work outside of clipping. I’m sure they produced a song for the artist Backxwash if I can recall correctly.
We did hear them doing a cover of “Tipsy” by J-Kwon as an industrial noise joint, and that’s before that other song got big. However, we did get a single a few months later with “Run It” and noticed how different it sounded with the electronics, and then we got the official word that an album was coming soon. We got another single later on with “Change The Channel,” with the theme we were getting being cyberpunk. The moment I heard “Change The Channel”, I definitely got that cyberpunk feel from the production and the lyrics.
It sounded like it would be a treat to hear how this would go down, and I gave it a few listens (probably a bit more than usual), and my feelings on this album are… I wanted to get through a lot of listens on this album, and that’s not disparaging on the album’s part. It’s trying to get into the lyrics of this and seeing some technology references. Like on the intro track, we get:
Damn kids, they’re all alike, okay
Maybe they’re right, okayAin’t nobody ’bout it, but the barrier’s barely a song
Ain’t no doubt about it, once you in capacity for sinnin’s infinite, isn’t it?
When it’s spinning on a disc, cord is dissonant, skipping bits
A kilobyte to eat, a killer might compete up in the right arenaEither way you a flatline construct
And created by everything that went amiss
The intro pulls the listener into a vortex with that almighty sound of dial-up (you know the sound if you lived through those days of the internet), seeing that capitalism has made the internet a tool for manipulating the masses and made people feel worthless and stripped from their value as a person.
We go to the 2nd track “Dominator,” and I got to say that these lyrics immediately jumped out to me:
Apathy had to make out of body the status quo
Avatar opportunity is creating the capital
And no cap, audiences are infinitely more valuable
When they thinking they ugly, inactive, fat, and unfashionable (Kill yourself) (I’m the one and only)Cool enough to rock the metal skin like it was natural
Matter of fact, come on and touch it, might be what you actually want
A waste of energy debating the mechanical
For genitals when gender is so easily programmable, you know thatConsciousness is a memory stick
And that means you that can plug it in and feel what they believe
It describes this dystopian digital world to be one where a lack of excitement is the status quo of society, the people think that they’re not the suitable attractive types that most people desire, and everyone’s mostly thinking suicidal thoughts, which is not that uncommon on the internet nowadays. It also describes an atmosphere filled with so many ads and billboards that you don’t see the sun, stars or anything in the sky anymore. It’s just all one big internet but as the Earth.
“Change the Channel” and “Run It” were the two big singles on the album; the former delivers that bombastic, chaotic sound with a ton of energy in Daveed’s delivery (all in such a short time), and the latter has that Detroit techno-influenced beat, telling the story of a drug dealing addict from the partying highs to the eventual lows of getting caught, arrested and maybe killed.
After those songs, we have an interlude called “Go.” There’s an instrumental track with “Simple Degradation (Plucks 1-13)” that features BitPanic, a computer music collective, and I’m digging the digital droning with the dissonant sound. The same can be said with the Plucks 14-18 piece a few tracks later. “Code” has a nice blend of the cyberpunk and street-wise aesthetics when it references avatars, thieves, and ‘talking code,’ and Daveed is just killing it with the lyricism. I said this before on his previous albums, but whenever he’s rapping fast, he’s actually telling a story. He’s saying something that can be interesting and makes me want to listen; it’s not just babbling nonsense for a few minutes. “Dodger” gets back to that fast-paced cyberpunk action aesthetic with the story being about a female analyst discovering a virus in the data system created by this rebel named Dodger. It describes itself like a futuristic love story near the end as she falls for the Dodger and said the hell with it, she’ll become one too.
“Malleus” is yet another instrumental and… well now I know what it is. A ‘malleus’ is a small, hammer-shaped bone in the middle ear that transmits sound vibrations from the eardrum to the incus, and us hearing the cacophony of sounds from somebody tuning their guitar or working on it a bit came from prominent guitarist Nels Cline. “Scams” does a familiar type of track I often recognize in clipping songs, centering the dominant woman and making her the badass you don’t want to cross, and the artist filling in that role is rapper Tia NoMore.
Blam, there she go, meet her at the corner store
A Michelin star, it don’t matter, she a factor
In the skin trade, tech game, dope game, no name spoke (Hoo)
Get it right
She be managin’ the funds, handlin’ the guns, brandishin’ the ones
When she run up in the club, to the VIP
All eyes seein’ the diamonds lyin’ on her tongue (Hoo)
There she go
She got plenty enemies, wanna be the Gs, thinkin’ they gon’ squeeze
“Keep Pushing” has a lot of double entendre’s for dope dealing in the streets, from the highs and the lows and that’s double for the lows. “Mood Organ” has this trippy, off-kilter, glitchy production with the title referencing a device to manipulate emotions and mental states at will through… well, keyboards. It’s also a reference to well-known author Philip K. Dick from his story, “Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?” aka the basis of the movie Blade Runner and of course, the sequel Blade Runner 2049.
“Polaroids” is mostly about forgetting the past, like how you look at Polaroids aka pics from those large cameras where when you take a pic, you wave it until you can see the photo… yes, can you tell that I’m in my 30s? Probably mid-30s by now? Oh, and “Madcap” was another short and sweet song. I’ll say for the shorter songs in here, they actually work fine with me this time. Usually, I’d complain about some songs being too short and me wanting them to be longer, but I never had that complaint here.
I say all that because the next track is completely my favorite one out of here, and it’s “Mirrorshades pt. 2”. It has the groove, the hypnotic beat, the feature verse from Cartel Madras and Eboshi. It does sound like something that would be played in rave clubs, and yes, mirror shades are sun glasses you wear and the person you’re looking at sees their reflection in the glasses. In other words, think of The Matrix. “Welcome Home Warrior” is an exploration of digital escapism into virtual worlds, like you can be the hero, save the girl, and make the world your world and be enthused by it, but then in comes a feature verse from Aesop Rock on the construction of your digital identity, pushing reality to the side in favor of living in your world, only for Daveed to come back and pull the wool from your eyes, saying those spaces aren’t really your own. So almost kinda like Sword Art Online in a way… well, maybe the abridged version since that one actually has better writing than the actual show?
The outro “Ask What Happened” is listing all the trouble, corruption and bullshit of the world with this eerie minimalist production before it breaks down into some drum ‘n bass sounds.
Fuel exhaust from the lift off set a switch off, and they all saw the light and flame
One more chance for the man with the best plan to get the money back and to keep them safe
Ain’t no peace in the streets, people fiend for release from the new kind of cheap cocaine
Contraband, Nicaragua and Iran and a handshake for the CIA
Lady on the TV sayin’ “Just say no” like everything will be okay
NYC say the wolf pack full of black boys had to be guilty of rape
But guess who’s slippin’ into they system, rippin’ them to the ground with every beat they make?
However, that isn’t the end of the album… yet. Turns out this wasn’t listed in any of the streaming versions and is probably a hidden track titled “Track 0”. It is said to be an entry of their “Story” series, referencing every other song in the series and it also segues back to the album intro, like it’s starting over. A NEVERENDING LOOP!!
OK, this album is a lot of delve into and possibly one of the hardest reviews I have done on this site. To me, this album is… fine. Like, for me, it’s a good album but not one of my favorites from clipping. I honestly liked their horror-themed albums more but I’m not going to turn it down. They got the cyberpunk themes right from the references, the imagery, the fact that “Mirrorshades” is on the tracklist. It’s a dense album in all senses from the lyrics, the references (whether you know cyberpunk or not), and the production has the vibes of a 90s sci-fi dystopian cyberpunk movie. Sometimes the music is often the best thing about those movies, and I can dig that.
FINAL VERDICT: Probably Stream First, then Decide to Buy or Not. I’m not going to change the channel on this nor is this dead to me. I’d still tune in to clipping.
DEAD CHANNEL SKY is available on Sub Pop Records. You can purchase it on CD, vinyl, digital download or you can stream it on your available platforms.