Another well regarded "underground" hip hop album, plus I liked his work with Busdriver and Radioinactive, and he's down with monome, so I'm down with that.
Background: Exquisite Corpse is a drawing game where each player, in turn, draws a part of a person/animal/monster without being able to see the other players' parts. The result is a dadaist, absurd mishmash, and its a choice title for a leftfield, sample-heavy album like this one. The samples bend, buzz, break erratically. Different tracks use different tricks in different combinations. There's groove here and there, but it's burbling about, gasping to the surface of a chaotic mix.
Like a drawing created by committee, its not overly cohesive. Its unknowable, hard to take in. But there's so many flourishes here and there, strokes in foreign hands, that it demands a closer look, and there seem to be hidden patterns around every corner.
The highlights are collaborations, including an uncharacteristically fast couple of verses from the usually-laconic Doom, a Jogger remix, and a Prefuse 73 collab that makes you immediately go "this kind of sounds like Prefuse". This doesn't have the sharpness of Prefuse across the board, and is mixed a bit cottoney (not unlike the Deltron 3030 album, see below), but still I'm intrigued. I suspect that all the twists and turns will help it grow on me, its an album that you can listen to in the background but that rewards your full attention. It reminds me of Endtroducing a bit; it won't reach that album's inexplicable heights, but its a good sign 4/5
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