#443 Canibal Ox - Cold Vein

Always looking for more good rap, this made a bunch of "best underground rap albums" lists - I don't know how I missed it up till now.

I've got a long way to go on my unified theory of rap, but this album nudged me along. There are three major kinds of satisfaction you can get from a rap album:
- Emotional: hard deliveries that make you feel like a kickass badass, or smooth snoop flows that make you feel like a laidback badass.
- Intellectual: punchlines, things that turn the phrase around, lines that make a little joke, references to shit that makes you smile.
- Visceral: somewhere in between, where the cadence of a delivery, the intricacies of the rhyme structure, tip your brain off on a subconscious level that something awesome is happening. This is the stuff that takes a bunch of listens to unpack, and then you realize how sick a certain line is.

You rarely get all 3. Gangsta rap is emotionally tough and full of hard-hitting punchlines, but it's all in the forefront, not enough twisting around underneath. Most underground stuff is very visceral in its appeal, full of shit that pulls itself out from under you. Das Racist is such a success in my book because they are viscerally complex and their lines are so dense with punchlines even those operate on a visceral level. Then you've got something like De La Soul, where it seems to all be intellectual wordplay, but without much punch in structure, nor in emotional heft.

This is all to say that this is a rare album that succeeds on all fronts. The rhymes are Das Racist level dense, fraught with doubleups and inner rhymes and ever-shifting structures, landing punchlines hard again and again, all within an aggressive, heavy delivery. It's one of the more complex rap albums you'll hear, and definitely one of the hardest among those in the running. It's exhausting to keep up, emotionally and viscerally both, but there's a cathartic satisfaction in trying.

El-P's production is just about perfect for it to, complex and dense, but with a certain lightness, woven through with melody ad grace, like a samurai sword. At least for a while, the tracks bounce around downright listenably, considering the heft of the rapping and the beats. Eventually, it gets a bit exhausting, running long as rap records are wont to do, but up till that point its as good a rap album as you'll hear if you're looking for something smart and tough both 4.5/5

You might like this if: you like complex, hard rapping. Simple as that.