★★★★☆
There is something singularly liberating about “ugly” music.
Songs that defy musical constraints come with their own inbuilt meditative quality: you can’t blast a record like Danny Brown’s Atrocity Exhibition in the middle of a packed party or over a family dinner, for example, and the record has been designed to be consumed alone.
As a result, a song like ‘Rolling Stone’ aims for distinctly sensitive targets, finding leverage in the places you thought secret and applying discreet pressure on wounds scabbed over. A lot of that harm comes directly from Brown’s voice, and four studio records in, the performer has evidently learnt how weaponise his leer.
Indeed, Brown’s razor blade ravaged tones represent the record’s true through line. They’re the bloodied river snaking through Atrocity Exhibition’s poisonous landscape, with the vocal on ‘Downward Spiral’ in particular coming across as genuinely threatening. Guest spots from names like Earl Sweatshirt and Kendrick Lamar serve to further reveal the hypnotising horror of Brown’s deliberately clunky, one-leprous-foot-after-the-other flow
Atrocity Exhibition is here for you, waiting, but not in the way you might like. It’s less a lover throwing pebbles up at a balcony and more Michael Myers glaring through glass, and through its great waves of grottiness, it somehow reaches the sublime.
Danny Brown’sAtrocity Exhibitionis available now through Warp.
