Further Anticon for Contemplation: Serengeti & Polyphonic

Creating something that breathers and has some sort of emotional heft or life after the moment of its inception escapes nearly every artist the endeavors some release, display or showing. It’s nary the fault of the individual and his or her efforts. One might spend ten hours creating ten minutes worth of music and have it be utterly void of anything but artifice. That’s difficult to clearly explicate in words – but you can see or hear it pretty easily. And when applying this to hip hop (the music as opposed to the culture, although it could be used in that broad scope) it becomes difficult to locate something with legs and hands and shoulders and a heart. There are, though, any number of ways by which to summon some template to work from and wind up with something passable if not laudable.

Despite anything written or read about Serengeti & Polyphonic, their album Terradactyl or Anticon, the label that the disc has been released through, this is all just a fish lying on the pier - something trying to draw breath, but can’t. It’s not for the plain effort injected into this project, the branding or layout of its marketing and over all presentation, but this disc comes of as a curio, a museum piece that accidentally spilled out onto the streets and somehow made it into various digital formats.

The perspective or background that each of these performers seems to be birthed from isn’t a place that has to do with rap music so much as some artsy creative realm where everyone paints and tells you what it means that the shadow falls to the left as opposed to the right. Polyphonic, the production dude outta the duo, even takes on ‘the Verbose’ at the end of his name in order to fill out his bio. But in that kind of out and out mental touting, while we can’t/won’t consider that to be tongue and or cheek related, is a pronouncement of talent, perhaps vaguely warranted, but uncalled for nonetheless.

The beats that make up Terradactyl, the title itself being a smug and somehow befitting piece of verbal effrontery, are more spacey than what’s been known to accompany a great deal of work from the Anticon stable even if it’s back catalog sports more than a few forays into out and out electronica. Seeing this live, though, would pit man against laptop. And that’s not anything living at all.

The emcee portion of this affair, Seregenti, who doesn’t summon the heat of his namesake seems ever enamored with a notebook, sounding as if he’s reciting strings of tangentially related concepts, personal situations and perspectives. There’s no denying the fact that some if it works in concert with that production, but the lack of actual personality on what one might refer to his flow moves beyond a cryptic deadpan into territory of a recital.

I came across some review of this disc comparing it, career-wise, with the leap that Kid A represented in Radiohead’s career. Perhaps, that’s applicable, but I found it amusing that a group that should be considered all needless bells, whistles and hype to this flailing, was compared to this electro-rap duo where many of the same critiques might be leveled.