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Hell Hath No Fury

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Clipse

 
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Hell Hath No Fury
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Avg: 3.5 (27 ratings)

  • Date Released: November 28, 2006
  • Genre: Rock/Pop
  • Style: Pop
  • Label: Arista
  • Copyright: (P) 2006 Arista Records LLC

Synthetic soundtracks for idling in a big car and shooing passersby with your bass-bin fuzz

  • We Say...

    To the uninitiated this may sound like hyperbole, but a simple first-time scan of its twelve tracks should be proof enough: there's not a single weak beat on Hell Hath No Fury.

    Part of that is down to the album's brevity: no skits where the jokes went stale before the tape stopped rolling; no sensitive b-boy cops to the quiet storm demographic, backed up by some generic R&B crooner of the moment; no half-assed attempts at fusions with pop, country or rock. Just a dozen mid-tempo, menacing bangers that buzz and squeal with a weird, ugly energy — synthetic soundtracks for idling in a big car and shooing passersby with your bass-bin fuzz.

    The other key to Fury's all-killer-no-filler success is its producer list: the Neptunes. That's it. In a decade when hip-hop albums became all-star dog's dinners, with a half-dozen or more big-name producers contributing beats with wholly incompatible vibes, this one-trackmaster line-up gives Fury a coherence that makes it listenable from-end-to end. It helps that the album also served as a delivery system for the Neptunes' last batch of truly great, truly strange beats (so far). Calling them "stark" makes these barely-embellished rhythms seem too bustling and full of life. They're free of traditional hooks, often downright unfriendly, but never less than attention-grabbingly inventive in their combinations of clonking percussion and sinister synth drones. It's a sonic world where even a smeared burst of goofy organ ("Momma I'm So Sorry") sounds like a seriously bad day at the circus.

    As for Clipse themselves, Malice and Pusha T continue to rap about one thing on their second official full-length — the procurement and distribution of cocaine, plus the pleasures and pains of the dealer lifestyle — but these one-dimensional, swaggering caricatures fit the Neptunes' cyber-pulp backdrops just about perfectly. A rapper could only get away with dropping a cringer of a pun like "the sounds of crackness" or calling himself the "black Martha Stewart" over a beat as deliciously weird, and weirdly funky, as "Ride Around Shining," where Audio Two lends its sidewalk-splitting rhythm box to John Carpenter. This is body-rock suitable for a grindhouse-grade horror flick. And the double-entendre, pusher-punning hook of "Keys Open Doors" is a little too on-the-nose, but it does even "Shining" one better with its truly eerie choral backdrop, perfect should any director decide to do a rap-centric Omen remake.

  • They Say...

    It took Clipse over four years to get their second proper album on the shelves. As they were eager to discuss, the lag wasn't their fault. Well documented in print and on the Web, the oil spills and trap doors placed in front of the Thornton brothers were numerous. However, they weren't completely handcuffed. They released a pair of popular mixtapes that only intensified the anticipation for the official follow-up to Lord Willin'. (A talk with Bill Withers might give them an idea of how the music industry can truly paralyze an artist.) If any of the trip-ups played a role in the end result, they could be considered blessings in disguise. Hell Hath No Fury is a lean, furious, cold-blooded album that is vividly to-the-point. As with Lord Willin', all the production work is credited to the Neptunes, though Chad Hugo's name appears nowhere in the credits. A couple exceptions aside, these are some of the sparsest, most off-kilter Neptunes beats. They prod, hiss, dart, and thump -- ideal backdrops to Pusha T's and Malice's blunt-force, if occasionally knotty, rhymes. "Ride Around Shining" is baroque boom-bap, nothing more than a neck-snapping beat, Richard Pryor-sounding grunts, and cascading harp filigrees. "Trill" grinds and slides under a swarm of hungry cyborg mosquitoes. "Mr. Me Too" is nearly as minimal, a slinking bump. Lyrically, coke dealing dominates the subject matter more on this set than on the debut. Clipse survey their operation and reap its rewards, from easy-to-understand quips like "Pyrex stirrers turned into Cavalli furs" to the relatively mind-bending "If you're looking for a couple roosters in the duffle, keep the 'hood screaming 'Cock-a-doodle-doo,' motherf*ckers." Apart from specific elements of the "Mind Playing Tricks on Me"-quoting "Nightmares," as well as a couple other brief instances, the rhymes are guardedly self-congratulatory, like the MCs are wiping the gains in the haters' faces, albeit with the nagging sense that it could all blow up in an instant. The whole thing, including the club-oriented tracks, is magnetically grim. [A clean version of the album was also released.]

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