You can pretty much guarantee that any album whose back cover contains a painting of a lynching isn’t going to be a sunny listen – but even if you go into Dälek’s Gutter Tactics expecting to hear some strange fruit, it’ll still shock you with the brute force of its seething, brooding intensity. The album kicks off with the charmingly titled “Blessed are They Who Bash Your Children’s Heads Against a Rock,” built around a hot minute of an impassioned foreign policy sermon from the Reverend Jeremiah Wright, and descends from there into a woozy, nightmarish world of droning guitars, ferocious beats, and lyrics buried beneath layer after sinister layer of cacophonous noise. It might seem odd for a hip-hop album to shove its MC to the back of the room, but Dälek isn’t like most hip-hop acts – even those who flirt with the post-rock fringes – and Gutter Tactics goes against the grain, demanding to be played front-to-back with rapt attention rather than diced into shuffle-sized bits on your iPod. Listening to it is like watching a pack of rabid dogs rip their dinner apart in a back alley at midnight, and songs like “Atypical Stereotype” and the title track are so dark they make the Roots sound like “Addams Family Groove”-era MC Hammer. It is, in other words, one of the least friendly rap albums you’re likely to hear all year – and also one of the hardest to turn away from. (Ipecac 2009)
