NEWS
EVENTS
Clipping at The 100 Club
RnB/Hip Hop | Tuesday 11th November 2014 | Lee
Every once in a while, an act comes along with a musical style too difficult to classify as one particular genre and are labelled “experimental”. Clipping are one such band. Just by listening to a minute of one of their tracks, the difficulty of labelling becomes evident. So what exactly are Clipping? Their songs fuse the organic sounds of something bearing industrial metal origins, a la Nine Inch Nails, with the lyrical style of MC Daveed Diggs. However, the inconsistency in the synchronisation of beats and rhymes ultimately makes it impossible to generalise this band, which makes their shows exhilarating.
Some may find the structures of their tracks frustrating or weird, but listening to this rare brand of experimental music live is simply fascinating. Daveed Diggs’ energy personifies everything great about Clipping, delivering a breathtaking performance. His lyrical intelligence is shown to all by how insanely fast the guy can rap. Not only is it the speed with which he does it, but the enthusiasm the man shows for his work, entrancing the audience throughout.
When you see a band such as Clipping live, you’re ultimately unsure of what to expect. You’ve heard their studio albums and recognised the originality in what they’re doing, but trying to picture how a live set would play out is practically impossible. Perhaps that’s what fascinated me most. The difficulty of imagining how the intensity of ‘Body & Blood’ or the maddening ‘Or Die’ would be received, but ultimately it was useless because their performance was far too unique to even attempt to predict what you’d be witnessing next.
Clipping are a band many won't be able to take to as their style is unique and disturbing in a way, but if imagining the rapid, intelligent flow of Childish Gambino merged with the unconventional force of Death Grips sounds good to you then Clipping are someone you should probably make yourself familiar with.
