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Death Grips – Fashion Week Album Review: Jenny Death When?
RnB/Hip Hop | Monday 19th January 2015 | Joe
Waiting for death, that’s what the Death Grips community has spent their New Year doing. Just, waiting for death. We were promised, on a piece of toilet paper, in the late of last year, that the-not-so-long (although it feels like forever now) awaited second half of The Powers That B (Jenny Death – the first half was the incredible Niggas on the Moon, a polarising effort that’s instrumentation will be touched on later) was going to drop by the end of 2014. We then got Inanimate Sensation, the first single from Jenny Death, in mid-December. Everything seemed like it was going to plan. I was sure, for whatever reason, that we’d be seeing Jenny Death on December 31st, as were a lot of us. However, when the clock struck 12 on NYE, I, amid the fervour of Fabric’s last proper NYE party, I was proven wrong. Like the kids on Santa’s naughty list (a place I feel we as Death Grips fans deserve to be on), we were deprived of what we all felt was going to be our last Christmas present of the year.
They fucked with us. Again.
I was annoyed, gutted even, so when at 3.30AM-ish a couple of weeks ago I saw a DG announcement on my Facebook Feed that read ‘download now’, I snatched at it. I didn’t even read what I was downloading, I just went for it. I assumed it’d be Jenny Death, but alas, once again, I was taken for a Ride (awful pun).
What I got, was, in so many words, a mix of brilliant instrumentals referred to in its file name as a soundtrack to Fashion Week. But that’s not all I got, I also got another in a long line of slaps to the face from one of my favourite rap groups: ‘J’ ‘E’ ‘N’ ‘N’ ‘Y’ ‘D’ ‘E’ ‘A’ ‘T’ ‘H’ ‘W’ ‘H’ ‘E’ ‘N’. The last letter of the otherwise identically named 14 tracks (all called ‘Runway’ with a different letter following each) on this album ask me, a reference to TheNeedleDrop and his video from late last year asking the question that DG now pose to us.
Jenny Death When?
The collective say we’ll see a physical release in late February, but who knows? For right now I’m just enjoying this extremely recent release. And shit, there’s a lot to enjoy. First thing’s first, the album is completely instrumental. How perfectly Death Grips: a rap group that drop an album without a word in sight (or sound).
Death Grips have always had a prowess when it comes to their instrumentals. Exmilitary was a masterclass in sampling and the Money Store along with No Love Deep Web had some of the most brutal and brilliant beats I’ve ever heard on a rap record. I saw them as the Swans of hip-hop after NLDW, touching, like Gira and Co. can, not just savagery, but primal savagery, like having the sludge of the soul shoved through your speakers, kicking, screaming and skipping. Government Plates and NOTM continued to push DG as an instrumental group in my mind, in fact I consider both albums instrumental efforts as engaging (if not slightly more so) than the lyrics roared over them. I know this may not be popular opinion, but to me, constructing an album around a severely corrupted collection of Bjork samples (filtered to within milliseconds of their existence and distorted to the point of being unrecognisable), was at least as interesting as Ride’s perverse, provocative and poignant lyricism.
I am happy to say that this album more than lives up to their talents as musicians. The tracks trounce your ear drums; the rhythms rip and ricochet off each other like a reflection in a really fucked house of mirrors. A lot of the material is original as far as I can hear, the band shifting drastically away from their sample saturated last release and proving to us all what we already know: it doesn’t matter what wall Death Grips decide to climb, they can cave it in and climb the wreckage.
And just to think, this amazing effort, it’s only a tease. That’s the point of it, that’s what it all goes back to, those 14 fucking letters that end each track respectively. ‘Jenny Death When’? I don’t know. That’s the truth. None of us do. The only thing I know for sure, is I can’t wait, and once you hear this album, you won’t be able to either.
Joe Clift
