Son Raw raise his trigger finger all these bloggers hit the decks…
I wasn’t crazy about Clams Casino at first and I have two good reasons why. First and foremost, I consider both Souljah Boy and Lil B to be absolutely unbearable and refuse to listen to anything they’re rapping over. Second, As a Madlib fan, Clams’ hypnagogic all-haze-everything vibe wasn’t nearly as impressive to me as it was for fans of cassette-only record labels who’ve never listened to rap beats. It takes more than a little fuzz and reverb to impress me. Yet over the past few months Clams has steadily won me over: his work with A$AP Rocky showed us what his beats sounded like with a competent emcee and now his latest work sees the NJ producer completely flipping the script.
Fact describes his Moon & Stars instrumental (last seen on Krit’s project) as “Clams goes Madchester” which is hilarious, accurate and (considering I have a soft spot for the Paris Angels) actually really cool. All English-raviness aside however, Clams cannily expands his reach from distorted samples to St-Germain approximations with remarkable ease with the results sounding something like the a lost Hip-House B-side. In 92, this would have been the beat to that runt-of-the-litter remix that Hip-Hop kids would have been too hard to play out but that killed internationally. In 2012 it’s the soundtrack to a southern rapper midway between UGK and The Native Tongues but it’ll probably make more noise as an instrumental twitter download. Feel free to pontificate about what this “means” but frankly, all that matters to me is that those drums swing like nobody’s business. That and Lil B is nowhere near it.
Download:
