With Fool’s Gold’s migration to the British label-giant Warp Danny Brown’s latest career phase has taken on quite a different form: The days of festival anthems are over. Instead, his fourth studio record »Atrocity Exhibition« is like pressing the self-destruction button. It’s not as if we didn’t know about his drug past, it’s just that this time, it’s being told much more forcefully, more detailed. Interestingly, the basic psychotic mood deriving from its telling adds an energy to the record’s pace that is not necessarily unhealthy – the album is as entertaining as it is shockingly enthralling. A paradise for peeping Toms. The self-reflective »Downward Spiral« begins with the record’s very first second, including cold sweat, hallucinations and suicidal thoughts. Danny Brown’s talent to properly grind on any given leftover beat is being vindicated with every track anew. Even on the posse-cut »Really Doe«, for which he assembled his somewhat mentally unfit contemporaries t Kendrick Lamar Ab-Soul and Earl Sweatshirt Danny Brown shines. The moment you’re warming up with the record, Paul White, who produced broad parts of the album, tinkers with the pace again. The broader the manic search for pain relief unfolds, the less connections to reality can be found – most of the fun of listening as an unconcerned observer comes from not being directly involved. Because even though hangover and depression are already waving from afar, Denny Brown is still right in the middle of ecstasy. As a concept album, it has a conclusive flow, which makes it his first record that is not too long.
FaltyDL
In The Wake Of Wolves
Central Processing Unit