Review Summary: Ear rape never felt so right.
Food for Animals is a band from Washington, D.C. that essentially *** all over what we call "hip-hop" with beats that are the musical equivalent of an elephant sitting on a sub-woofer. The beats at first may make your ears bleed but give this record time, you'll come to realize ear rape never felt so right.
Scavengers starts with "Oh Oh Oh" which essentially serves as an intro and also one of the only real problems that drags this record down; too much filler, almost half the tracks on this album are only 30 seconds long and mostly consist of random samples thrown around. Although not much of a bother on the first few listens, they quickly become grating. Luckily, their short and thus don't add much to the album, they simply take away time.
What the real draw of this record is as I specified earlier; the beats. The first real track on here "Elephants" is a fine example of how an elephant sitting on a sub-woofer would sound like and it's also one of the albums strongest tracks. What starts out as unlistenable noise starts to become listenable.
Another highlight is "Brand New" which brings a whole new side to this album; actual beats. But not your regular amount of beats, the type of beats that seemingly fly all over the place in a jumbled mess and yet it somehow works, the track starts to fall apart at the end but this is common with much of this record, *** flies around and eventually it starts to stink. Unfortunately, "Brand New" is the only beat heavy track on the album. "Cut and Paste" features a few beat heavy moments but it seems to fit into the more noise aspect of tracks like "Elephants" and "Muckrakers"
It wouldn't be a hip-hop record without an MC and Food for Animal's MC Vulture Voltaire does his job just fine, his rhymes don't necessarily stick with you after the record is done but with a fast and furious delivery, it won't necessarily just pop out of your head afterwards. The beats are provided by Ricky Rabbit who does an fantastic job supplying the beats, if you could call them beats... The combination of these two never seems to reach the height of great MC/producer teams of the past but they seem to be on the road to success with the quality of the work presented here.
Food for Animals have succeeded in making a record that can both provide ear pleasing beats and ear killing ones. The combination of Vulture and Ricky isn't quite as potent as it could be yet but this EP gives signs that something great is down the road. This EP shows promise for this group, if they cut out the filler and provide more beat filled tracks like "Brand New"; Food for Animals could very well be the pioneers of "noise-hop"
One thing that you need when listening to this for the first time is patience as the beats are far more abstract then what most hip-hop seems to offer. You can just throw your textbook definitions out the window as it serves little good for this EP. Any one who is interested in obscure music that pushes the boundaries of what can be even considered "music" should give this a listen, if they can make it through it all, that is.
Overall Rating: 7.3/10
C+
