Review: Hudson Mohawke - Butter (2009, Warp)
Opening his debut album with lush synths, screeching (h)air-metal guitars and those live-sounding drums MPC purists love so much, 22-year-old Scottish prodigy Hudson Mohawke makes it clear enough that this isn't your average hip-hop record. He's at once got a lot to live up to and nothing to prove; hailed as the "heir apparent to Dilla's legacy," HudMo really just wants to produce something different. Between "Trykk"'s indigenous crunk and the cathartic ambiance of "Star Crackout" he fulfills his honorable aspiration, crafting here an 18-track technicolor display of blaring horns, tribal beats, bizarrely quantized rhythms, dismantled phonograph snippets, strangely suitable R&B guest spots, and plenty of boom-bap hardness. His rare approach to sampling - crafting original melodies on keyboards and deconstructing them digitally, as if from vinyl - has never really been done before, especially on such a large scale; that and the composer's tendency to tag tracks with his little sister's voice already form the basis for a strikingly unique work. Although it's easy and even instinctual to peg Hudson Mohawke's influential lineage (more familiar artists Prefuse 73, The Glitch Mob, Luke Vibert, and aforementioned 12'' champion Jay Dee spring to mind), the fact remains that Butter's varied tracks, like the opus in its entirety, sound as wonderfully diverse as they do undeniably fresh.
