Our Review:

The debut from LA noise-hop trio Clipping. (and yeah, the period is part of the name) finds roots in classic hip hop, but augmented with super minimal abstract noise, the sort of stuff you might hear on an RRR comp, think Bastard Noise or Sissy Spacek making a hip hop record and you'd be close. Even more interesting is that the two guys responsible for the music in Clipping. are Jonathan Snipes and William Hutson, might also be known for their stunning score to the Stanley Kubrick conspiracy documentary Room 237, the soundtrack which was released on Death Waltz.

But this is no retro soundtrack. Clppng is twisted noisy weirdness, wild feedback drenched analog skree, squelch drenched gristle, hiss and hum and screech and howl and thrum and buzz, blasts of digital noise wound around low slung beats. From the onset, rapper Daveed Diggs spits rapid fire on devastating "Body And Blood" that rides a grinding industrial beat, with a creepy processed voice 'chorus.' Then "Work Work" surprises (as does much of the record), with its almost dreamy looped glitchy gamelan, that transforms into some low slung low rider booming bass throb. And while at first blush, some of the lyrics sound typically hip hop sexist, dig deeper, and there's way more going on, which is again balanced when Cocc Pistol Cree delivers her bad ass verse. And there are other guests too, King T, Gangsta Boo, Guce and more, but it's the core three who have their sound down. King T's guest verse on "Summertime" is a crusher, especially when the background sound swells into a cloud of alien laser blasts, deep bass thrum, and woozy sonic squiggles. Let's not forget the insanely infuriatingly brilliant "Get Up", where the music is just the sound of an alarm clock, maddening for sure, but then so satisfying when this modulates into a weirdly radio pop chorus. The magic of Clipping. is that it can be so obtuse and difficult, but still so groovy, so hooky, so funky, and so catchy.

The vinyl edition comes in a super swank spot varnish printed gatefold, with an extra lp side, loaded with 100 locked grooves: noisy, distorted, blown out, abstract, dubby, clicky, funky, bloopy, bleepy and pretty much every variation in between.