Concept albums, like Stevie Wonder’s Secret Life of Plants or Pink Floyd’s The Wall, hold a special place in the imaginations of music lovers because they exist as something more meaningful than a collection of songs.

Though each track might be more or less interesting than another, as a group they can evoke a feeling, or a change of feelings, that’s greater than the discursive jumble of thoughts in any other off-the-shelf LP.

So, to judge a concept album like Concrete Desert – the latest project by producers Kevin Martin (the Bug) and Dylan Carlson (Earth) – requires a bit of reverse engineering.

Imagine a world dominated by manmade landscapes, devoid of non-mechanized sentience. In every direction is cement. Nobody’s happy. Everything sucks. Basically, Los Angeles – except everywhere. This is the setting for Concrete Desert, as the first track “City of Fallen Angles” implies.

With song titles like “Broke”, “Don’t Walk These Streets”, “Hell A”, and “Agoraphobia”, a listener can get the gist of this album’s major themes without too much effort towards intuition. What the Bug and Earth have done is make an audio image of a certain type of self-imposed apocalypse.

By mixing a droning heavy metal with an ambient western electronica background, this hour-long LP takes the listener on a trip to what may soon be the future.

Concrete Desert feels a little like a soundtrack to the type of movie that involves skeletons riding motorcycles and long shots of a sun on the horizon, on the verge of going supernova. The guiding ethos of the album seems to be to capture the idea of what intense, concussive melancholia is like. It seems to say, “Hell isn’t pitchforks and earthquakes, it’s an endless, dry monotony.”

This isn’t to say that Concrete Desert is dry or monotonous, but it does have an aspect of that. The whole album walks a line that stays just north of boring, with an occasional toe-dip below. The proximity the Bug and Earth share with yawnsville can be excused, because to capture the bleakness of the world Concrete Desert inhabits, they have to indulge in a little dronage.

This isn’t a “get out of your seat and freak-out” album; it’s the opposite, and that’s a good thing. In a music world of screaming distraction, it’s nice to listen to an album that asks its audience to look inward and consider the self, and our place in the world.

Returning to the concept behind the concept album, to determine whether people will like Concrete Desert is, in part, a factor of the music’s quality – which is fine, great really – but also contingent on how vested a person is in the apocalypse. Want to hear the bottomless, gaping void of Hell? Concrete Desert sings that song.

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From a hardware standpoint, Angels & Devils is not an album for your iPod ear buds or your cell phone speaker. It is layered like an ice fisher in February, so a little speaker can’t convey all the intricate minglings of the industrial synthetics ramping in and out in time with the vocals. You can hear it fine, but Angels & Devils is a calling card for Kevin Martin, the production level is master-warrior class to the seventh degree. So you’d think that since this is his album and he put so much time into texturing backgrounds and developing weird noises that he’d totally gum up the aesthetics of the featured vocalist, but no. The Bug gets what the vocalist is and doesn’t push his perogative. Take “Fuck a Bitch” featuring Death Grips; it has the sound of a record recorded in a BDSM warehouse by a raving maniac, which is classic Death Grips, but it also sounds good. In this instance The Bug took an extremely niched ensemble and produced them into something that nearly any audience can vibe on, lyrics notwithstanding, without ruining the brain hemorrhage inducing modus operandi that Death Grips fans love.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-S8MpWcQX0w

For the whole album The Bug focuses on doing his job and lets the lyricist do theirs without much mucking about on the voice work. Just a little echo effect, some slowing where appropriate, but in all cases the singing artist is recognizable and their style is on point. What this means for the album is that every song is different from the one before, so you can listen to Angels & Devils over and over without getting bored. It’s like the best rollercoaster in the theme park but without the lines or safety restraints: just go until you puke.

Obviously the songs aren’t all alien to each other. There’s a shared motif at the core of each track, a lurking evil like the music is coming out of the hollowed trunk of a dead, black tree in the middle of the kind of forest where people definitely got hanged. Even the happier songs, like “Mi Lost” featuring Miss Red, have a touch of the bleak. Overall, it’s safe to say that Angels & Devils isn’t for your office party, but might work out at your dungeon party.

Though it’s a strong album, it isn’t without its flaws. The worst songs, and that’s a relative term, are the ones that are purely of The Bug. “Pandi” and “Ascension” feature nobody and are straight instrumental tracks, but they’re also kind of boring. Kevin Martin is a producer at heart and, as evidenced by those two songs, he needs a source from which to feed. Through symbiosis, he elevates a track beyond what he or the vocalist could do on their own. Perhaps he isn’t a brilliant soloist, but as part of a team he’s a grand warlock, and that’s what you really want in a producer anyway.

Angels & Devils is both unique and relatable; start to finish it’s a great record. Official release is on August 25th via Ninja Tune with a North American tour to follow.

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Each of the four songs have a collaborator: Danny Brown, Flowdan, Daddy Freddy, and Kiki Hitomi. Fellow Brit and grime artist Flowdan is featured on half of the tracks.

The EP  starts with a title that could describe the entire four-track EP. “Freakshow” features the highly entertaining Danny Brown, and Kiki Hitomi, vocalist for King Midas.  Brown is fantastic. His style takes the brain and basically bounces it around like a basketball. His lyrics are creative, emphasising words in odd but interesting ways, frequently abbreviating various words. He mentions all sorts of things — pinot grigio, downtown condos, Cesar salads — things that don’t typically belong in a rap song. Hitomi’s voice, on the other hand, is a haunting and memorable contrast to Brown’s jocular rhymes. She holds her own ground, there is a sense that she has the power to do her own damage as a member of the boys club.

Flowdan keeps the “riddim” with “Dirty” which could well be an anthem of any big city center. When he hits the chorus, he insists that the song is not as dirty as much as it is “murky.” That could be said for the whole EP. It’s not exactly dirty as in repulsive, but definitely murky, as in something weird and possibly pretty cool is about to go down.

Martin has some training as a journalist, and his interest in other voices, what they sound like and what they say, is apparent in the third track “Kill Them.” Featuring Daddy Freddy, “Kill Them” seems to be built around Daddy Freddy, the music wraps around the voice once again giving emphasis to vocal talent.

Overall, Filthy is a solid EP, the kind that would be nominated for the Best Sex Album of the year if the Grammys introduced a category of that sort.

Album release date: August 20, 2013

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_F8GTW4MtUo

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