Clipse, Hell Hath No Fury

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.