After announcing its reunion in 2007, Anti-Pop Consortium has finished its fourth album, Fluorescent Black. Set for release via Big Dada on October 13, the disc arrives just in time for the equilibrium-disturbers’ performance at All Tomorrow’s Parties NY, as well as panacea for a hip hop world overdosing on hipster rap. (September 22 update: The release date has been moved forward to September 29.)
Here’s the press release, because those things can explain these things much better than I can:
Six years after they parted ways to pursue separate projects, Anti-Pop Consortium have reunited and recorded their fourth album Fluorescent Black, slated for release October 13th on Big Dada Recordings. APC, who took hip-hop by surprise with their 2000 debut, Tragic Epilogue, proceeded to make a name for themselves as one of the genre’s premiere boundary-pushers with Shopping Carts Crashing (2000) and cemented their status as luminaries with Arrhythmia (2002), say they reunite enriched by the time apart. “We’re grown men,” says Anti-Pop’s Beans. “So our acceptance of our differences has allowed to bring all that more magic to the table. We’re stronger now and the music is better for it.”
When Anti-Pop Consortium’s Beans, M. Sayyid, Earl Blaze, and High Priest parted ways in 2002 to pursue other projects, they left a gap in hip-hop no other group was entirely prepared to fill. 2002’s Arrhythmia was proof enough that if any other group of MCs could match the collective’s left-field adventurousness or their lit-caliber lyrical dexterity, none had produced a record that both pushed the envelope with experimentation and made heads nod. As Dusted Magazine put it, Arrhythmia “throws down the gauntlet to the rest of indie hip-hop – yeah, it’s one thing to spit complex vocabulary like a thesaurus, but how about you make your music move?” Anti-Pop Consortium disbanded shortly after the record was released and nearly seven years later the challenge posed to hip-hop by Arrhythmia remains largely untouched. With Fluorescent Black, APC return to continue push boundaries and challenge their contemporaries.
Here’s the track listing:
- 1. “Lay Me Down”
- 2. “New Jack Exterminator”
- 3. “Reflections”
- 4. “Shine”
- 5. “C Thru U”
- 6. “Volcano”
- 7. “Timpani”
- 8. “The Solution”
- 9. “Get Lite”
- 10. “NY to Tokyo” (feat. Roots Manuva)
- 11. “Superunfrontable”
- 12. “Born Electric”
- 13. “Apparently”
- 14. “End Game”
- 15. “Capricorn One”
- 16. “Dragunov”
- 17. “Fluorescent Black”
