Scalper: The Beast and the Beauty (Like Water/digital outlets)

 |   |  1 min read

Scalper: The Beast and the Beauty (Like Water/digital outlets)

Those old Romans had a phrase which is very useful: sui generis. It means singular, unique, in a genre/category of its own.

The music of Auckland-based producer/poet/rapper and former Fun-Da-Mental member Nadeem Shafi aka Scalper is definitely sui generis.

His voice and spoken-word lyrics are dark, full of foreboding, touch on the mythic and are sometimes -- often actually -- downright menacing. But they are married to fascinating musical backdrops which shift from gloomy trip-hop like Massive Attack on a downer (Dust on this, his fourth album) jazz soundtracks (Sleep with trumpet and flute weaving around), a sample of heroic orchestral music (So Special), dreamscape ambience across heavy downbeats (Ink) with some gritty surface noises included to further add to the atmospherics.

What makes Scalper's sonic palette so interesting -- and the songs discrete within the broody vision -- is just how elevating it can be as it sits in counterpoint to the lyrics, as on Ten Reasons here where a rippling loop of what sounds like a Middle Eastern zither provides the bed behind lyrics which include “hunger pains, hungry for his fame, slaves to a monster, hungry for his praise, lay shackled in chains . . . nothing remains, but remains”.

This is not the apocalypse but a look back at fallen idols, fake gods and the folly of human vanity.

Savior's a Savage opens with the lines of the old nursery rhyme Rock-a-Bye Baby which are pretty menacing anyway but now even more so as he declaims the words across his typically cavernous drum sound and moves into the monster under the bed, a monster baying for blood . . .

Scalper's music, vision and style has been consistent for over a decade and it has always been Elsewhere's uneasy pleasure to draw attention to his art which we can only describe as . . .

sui generis.

.

You can hear and buy this album (and others) at his bandcamp page here.


Share It

Your Comments

post a comment

More from this section   Music at Elsewhere articles index

Lonnie Holley: MITH (Jagjaguwar)

Lonnie Holley: MITH (Jagjaguwar)

For a singer, 68-year old Lonnie Holley is an interesting sculptor. And while this album – only his third I believe, his first for Jagjaguwar – is not without interest (and it's... > Read more

Brigid Mae Power: Head Above Water (Fire/Southbound)

Brigid Mae Power: Head Above Water (Fire/Southbound)

Elsewhere is well-known for approaching English and Irish folk music with some caution if not outright suspicion. The lamentations, murder and miserablism, references to medievalism,... > Read more

Elsewhere at Elsewhere

EPs by Yasmin Brown

EPs by Yasmin Brown

With so many CDs commanding and demanding attention Elsewhere will run this occasional column by the informed and opinionated Yasmin Brown. She will scoop up some of those many EP releases, in... > Read more

CARLOS SANTANA, THE CRUCIAL ALBUMS (2013): White light, with a Latin beat

CARLOS SANTANA, THE CRUCIAL ALBUMS (2013): White light, with a Latin beat

One of the dumbest questions you can ask a musician in an interview – and it was asked a lot by people writing for teen-pop magazines in the 60s – is this conversation-stopper:... > Read more