Dalek
Gutter Tactics
Ipecac
By Jose Fritz
If I cannot blame the white man whomsoever may I blame? Can I blame Newark, New Jersey? Can I blame Hip Hop? No. The year was 2000 and I lived in a shitty neighborhood in North Jersey close enough to the East River to smell it but not close enough to see it. I was there in the beginning and I know perfectly well that the only thing left to blame is ourselves.
Dalek’s EP Negro Necro Nekros was two years old when I found it. In that day I had not even flirted with the idea of hip hop. As a hip hop outsider, it all lacked that vital connection that makes music belong to you. What drew me to that disc I can’t exactly say. I saw the name Dalek on a handbill, I saw the name Dalek on a marquee, I saw the name Dalek on a playlist. I saw it on the Gern Blandsten website. It’s one of those ineffable forces like magnetism or gravity where one body of greater mass simply attracts things.
The cymbals sounded like sticks on brass, the drums like sticks on skins. It was a record that sounded like sitting behind the bass drum. The samples were mad: sitar, strings, jazzy drum solos, tabla drums, break beats, and William Burroughs creakily mumbling about millions of images. It was noisy, dissonant and dark and some of the tracks were over ten minutes long. My hip hop-loving friends hated it. Good. Fuck them. This was mine.
The goth-tinged guitars that used to earn them comparisons to My Bloody Valentine are missing this time. The Public Enemy and Rakim-like direct confrontation is also absent. But this is not an abandonment of their roots. Some things remain constant. The Oktopus is still a crate digger, always a kingly manipulator of noise. From the very beginning in interviews they repeatedly referenced Africa Bambaataa’s sampling of Kraftwerk. This is high praise for experimentation, genre-busting, and the recycling of Dadaist noise. This time the noise is thick a thieves, thick as blood, it’s a layer of tar over filthy beats.
The ideas evolve: every record they’ve done feels like a new species, or an old species sprouting and stress-testing vestigial limbs. Yes, the results can sometimes be awkward or even impenetrable but the experiment is still in progress and with their abstractionist tendencies in full swing you have to expect that this is going to hurt sometimes.
I think of that first EP now because it has been a decade of Dalek. Gutter Tactics is their 7th significant release. Instead of becoming more commercial over time Dalek has managed to infiltrate and affect commercial hip-hop, while giving little ground. I’ll grant that the call-and-response chorus on “No Question” is catchy. But is it pop? At the same time they are mastering their skills they are also wading more deeply into the mud than before. Amidst the least intelligible noise there are still hints at hooks, and maybe even hints of what’s to come.
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