ho imagined that hip hop would have overtaken hair metal as the disaffected teenage choice of commercial music? Tupac has replaced Motley Crue, and (in a way) this fact is a victory over the institutional racism rap music faced upon its emergence within our cultural dialogue. Amidst technological acceleration Outkast have been declared the new Beatles. So financially established is mainstream hip hop that other more experimental, innovative, and (sometimes) thought-provoking work is dismissed as ‘untrue.’ Thavius Beck has a jazzy name, and his new record is on a buzz worthy label. Well, here’s some straight formalist critique for ya—Decomposition is a bad album. This music just isn’t noteworthy, whether you wear a backpack or not.

Amateurism reeks from all corners. The beats have a thin, tinny quality, as if it was recorded in a basement or a bedroom. Sometimes these kinds of rough edges add to the zeitgeist of a record, but here they only serve to frustrate the listener. Apparently a genreless blend of IDM and hip hop is what is being sought after. What we get instead is generic, repetitive keyboard scales coupled with rather unsophisticated drum machine work. “What Lurks in the Darkness...” and “In Memoriam” share the most trite, boring synth line I’ve ever had the displeasure to try to write about. You think we’d be somewhere else by now other than bum-bummm-bummmmm. At least El-P has enough sense over amplify and distort his uncreativity. Did I mention the corny, noodling, 1980’s guitar samples? A looped, upward pitched guitar solo serves as the base of “Demons of Destruction.” Perhaps this was an attempted Public Enemy reference. It ends up sounding like a mediocre Psychic TV remix.

Keeping true to the acid house phase Psychic TV model, the majority of the tracks’ vocals are goofy and/or quasi-philosophical spoken word samples taken from found sources. Rarely are these anything more than awkward, forcing ideas down our ears over and over. For instance, in “To Make Manifest,” we get the nugget “thoughts determine what you want / actions determines what you get” the first ten repeats—we don’t need to hear it the other fifty times. You end up wanting to punch the CD player the way you wanted to punch your high school guidance counselor. A handful of tracks also feature original rhymes. Strangely, though there are four different MCs (including Beck himself), all the rhymes are stilted and flowless. Quality MCs weave complex patterns of alliterative counter point; the bottom feeders just pluck out wooden, thought form AA BB rhyme schemes. Decomposition treats us to a lot of the latter, and very little of the former.

It’s not all crappy. Some of the vocal samples are genuinely funny. The Learning Channel biblical documentary voice over is creepy to the extreme. Fundamentalist religious types are always good sound bite fodder. Also, not infrequently the slapping, clicking beats evoke enough of a Roni Size vibe for things to be tolerable. Elements like these though hardly add up to much. If you going to make an album about decay, you better have first mastered the genre at hand before you start deconstructing it. At best, Decomposition sounds like a good first demo tape, not the ultimate hip hop solvent it attempts to be.