Review Summary: In the future, the only music is Death Grips.
Contrary to popular belief, Death Grips is not a hip-hop collective. It's beyond that. It's the evolution of the genre to the point of excess. It's the idea that hip-hop has no limit, the imagination of men can wander far into the dark abyss and return a monster. When
Exmiliatary dropped last year, people were taken aback by the putrid anger that seemingly oozed from every pore of its existence. To say that anger is gone on
The Money Store would be misleading, but it is certainly more polished than its predecessor. This album still manages to retain the anti-establishment, f
uck everything attitude though, and that is part of its evil charm.
Everything on
The Money Store goes against traditional methods. Every time the production hits a great melody, it collapses in on itself in a fit of glitched out rage. Our beastly emcee only maintains clean verses in tracks momentarily until tourettes overcomes his last sane thought. The music clashes with itself, as if it is a towering machine, struggling to maintain its function of infecting the masses with sound. The lyrics often times are drowning in layers of production, and only surface for a moment to expend their last breath in a blood curdling yell. The album is a wonderful contradiction, like an undiagnosable disease, slowly eating away at our decadent society.
In reality
The Money Store is the exaggeration of what our society has become. On the surface it's pretty and polished but at the core of it, it's ugly and rotten. Tracks like “System Blower” hit with a mechanical precision before slowly spiraling into industrial madness, showing us just how futile a normal life is. In a culture today where many of us hide behind the veil of the internet, we are systematically becoming less and less human. Empathy is at an all time low. An album like this manages to simultaneously be offensive and oddly mesmerizing.
The Money Store is what happens in the heart of men behind the cultural curtain. There are no delusions here, Death Grips know exactly what they are: the filthy grime that greases the gears of the machine. This is imperfection at its finest, and as so perfectly put in the track “Hacker”, they are “teaching bitches how to swim”. Lead the way, Death Grips.
