CD Odyssey Disc 1934: Edan

A long day at work was mitigated by a lovely ride home with the top down and listening to this next album for the last time, albeit with some fondness.

Disc 1934 is…Beauty and the Beat

Artist: Edan

Year of Release: 2005

What’s up with the Cover? A collage of heads and some swirly colours.

How I Came To Know It: I discovered Edan through his other record, “Primitive Plus” (reviewed back at Disc 1871). I was on a search for that record when I found this one instead. I was jonesing for some Edan that day, and decided to buy it on spec, and hope for the best.

How It Stacks Up: I have two of Edan’s three studio LPs. Of the two, “Beauty and the Beat” is #2.

Ratings: 3 stars

A rapper with a creative flow is a rare and precious thing. One that can blend the dense rhyming you might expect from MF Doom with the furious beat forward delivery of Big Daddy Kane? Well, sign me up.

That’s what Edan brings to the table, and things were primed for me to have a good time except for that all elusive key third ingredient – killer beats. As a result you get a four star talent with some two star creative traditions. The result had me marveling at the brilliance of Edan’s flow, while bemoaning the record that might have been had he been just a little less experimental.

First, to the flow. Edan has an innate and natural talent that on the surface flows through bars with apparent disregard for even the basics of pocket awareness. However, it is all an illusion. In fact, his phrasing is next-level complex, climbing up, down and through complex time signatures with the skill of a jazz master.

And yeah, I know, I sometimes throw shade at jazz, but that doesn’t mean I don’t admire their talent to turn music into high math. That ain’t easy, and neither is what Edan gets up to.

He also does it with a frantic, urgent delivery that is on the very edge of losing the line without ever doing so. It isn’t that Edan never takes a breath – he just takes them in weird places that make it all the more interesting as you hang on for dear life and try to pay attention.

And you’ll want to pay attention, because his rhymes are dense and brilliant. At first blush you might be tempted to think he’s just throwing as many rhymes as he can into a sentence, but you quickly realize the whole thing has a purpose. It’s an art-infused purpose mind you -a free-form inspired stream of consciousness that somehow holds a plot together amid all the chaos.

That all sounds pretty good, but it’s a house built on a foundation of noise art that I just couldn’t get behind. Video game sounds, percussion on what sounds like random objects, jazz samples and amorphous feedback gurgles. There is a lot going on, but what isn’t happening is a consistent grounding beat.

So while that complex soup of sounds is working overtime in Edan’s head, and showcasing his brilliance, there are precious few songs you can tap your foot to. Listening you are struck by how intelligently constructed this record is, but it is also exhausting.

I get it - Edan does not want to make it easy on himself or on you. Like any art, music should challenge you. I just found it too much work and, at times, too clever for its own good.

The signs of this are there on his previous record, “Primitive Plus” but as the name of that record suggests, Edan was paying homage to earlier forms through his new and intriguing style. The tension of old and new works there, and the songs that have a similar approach on “Beauty…” like “Fumbling Over Words that Rhyme” and “Torture Chamber” capture the same magic.

But too often in his pursuit of a new and complex beauty, Edan leaves behind the basics of the beat. It’s deliberate, and it is done very well, but that doesn’t mean I liked it.

And so I am going to reluctantly part with this record, just like years ago when I parted with that bottle of Ardbeg on my scotch shelf. I was tempted to keep it because it looked good and suggested I was cool enough to handle all that complex peat. But the truth is that while I admired it, I didn’t enjoy it. Just like this record.

Best tracks: Fumbling Over Words that Rhyme, Torture Chamber, Making Planets

CD Odyssey Disc 1871: Edan

Before I get started a quick apology for my last review, wherein readers have pointed out that I mistakenly referred to Cheekface as Cake not once…but twice. What the hell? Similar does not equal same. I also apologize to Cheekface, an excellent band that does not deserve such obvious copy edit oversight. I have since corrected that entry.

OK, let’s do better.

Disc 1871 is… Primitive Plus

Artist: Edan

Year of Release: 2002

What’s up with the Cover? One interpretation of this cover is that this robot has been programmed to walk the dog. One boring interpretation.

Another interpretation would be that this robot was designed to “learn” from its human owners, but ultimately murdered them, after an ill-fated family movie night where it failed to understand the “pretend” nature of a sci fi film selected by the youngest son. Now, alone in the house (apart from the battered corpses of the former occupants) it is caught in a logic loop mimicking their previous behaviours.

Here we see it walking the dog on a winter morning. The neighbours thought it was quite a nifty spectacle until, ten days later, it was dragging the now dead dog around like it was still alive. The police were called in, the mayhem uncovered, and a very wide recall of JIROK home robots (and subsequent class action lawsuit) were all quick to follow.

But I digress…

How I Came To Know It: I read about this album on a “top” album list of some kind that has since been lost in the mists of time. I decided to see for myself if it deserved such accolades. Turns out, it did.

How It Stacks Up: I have two Edan albums, and “Primitive Plus” is the best.

Ratings: 4 stars

Edan (aka Edan Portnoy) likes words, and dude knows a lot of them. The Maryland rapper has a density of language that is rivaled by very few. MF Doom comes to mind, but otherwise this is about as densely packed a bale of rhymes as you are likely to find.

A heavy dose of rhyme does not a great emcee make, however, at least not on its own. You need to have flow, and your words have to be going somewhere.

Here things became harder to decipher. “Primitive Plus” came at me so fast I wasn’t at first sure if it was brilliant or just clever for clever’s sake. Ultimately, it is brilliant. At first things are moving along so fast you wonder what the point of it all is. Then you realize that underneath all those verbal gymnastics is a rapidly moving kaleidoscope of imagery that may not always be telling a story but IS always painting a picture.

Edan raps so fast on this record that it feels like he never takes a breath. Of course, that’s impossible, and it is just his lily-pad leap style that constantly tiptoes forward that makes it feel like that way. The break is just so hidden in the flow you gotta listen for it.

His style evokes the coolest skinny kid in normcore clothes in school. Nerd central yes, but nerdism turned on its head to be the hippest thing you’ve ever heard. His mid-Atlantic accent curls around his delivery and draws out vowels in a way that helps hold your attention through the soup of multisyllabic wordplay. That wordplay is a torrent of rhyme. If there is a record out there that has as many words per minute as “Primitive Plus” I can’t think of it.

From a beat perspective, Edan combines samples from early rap masters like Eric B. and Rakim with a muesli of thumps, beeps and sproings that break most rules of what should be fun to listen to and somehow still works.

Underneath it all, Edan has written a love letter to early rap. It isn’t remotely your dad’s rap music, but it borrows heavily from the themes and structures of that early sound, even to the point where its main theme is that age-old original approach – rapping about how well he can rap.

He takes the flows of that previous time and turns them on their head, then injects them with aluminum and quicksilver and sets them dancing. It isn’t evolution so much as a cyborg implant. Part organic, part robot, and manic as all get out.

Of the million lines that caught my attention in Edan’s endless flow I’ll end by sharing just one that best sums it all up:

“Silver surfer on the cerebellum.”

The Power Cosmic indeed, but here the intergalactic travel all happens between your ears.

Best tracks: One Man Arsenal, Humble Magnificent, Emcees Smoke Crack, #1 Hit Record, Primitive Plus, You Suck, Run That Shit!,