Sonic Router

VOUCH: Cannibal Ox – The Cold Vein [Def Jux]

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To continue our ongoing series of personal recommendations Sonic Router’s editor shines a light on a seminal rap album by New York’s Cannibal Ox…

I spent a lot of time in my late teens/early twenties on eBay buying up Anticon CDs. Much like any addiction it sprawled and grew into a something of a bonafide collection. After painstaking attention I got the Greenthink CD, the Greenball II album by Jel, DJ Signify’s Mixed Messages, the Sebutones 50/50 Where it Counts LP (which I in turn sold for a tidy profit, a transaction I’ve physically regretted ever since); all that rare shit. I bought the book of alternative sketch poetry, by Doseone, spent hours tracking down people who had near mint versions of his solo albums and those self released CDs by Sage Francis. I spent the same money on importing t-shirts from the states as it cost to buy them. I was more than a little bit obsessed.

If they put something out, if they toured… hell, if I’d heard they farted in a lift somewhere in London I probably would have got on my bike and tried to get there before the dust settled on the fragrance. I went to see Sage Francis two nights in a row. I saw Subtle headline a show alongside probably my all time favourite artist of that era, Fog, one night and then I went to watch them again play second fiddle to some sheista act the following night. But there’s one album of that era that never stemmed from the California based Anticon HQ that seems to have lasted the test of time better for me: Cannibal Ox’s seminal The Cold Vein, put out on the New York based Def Jux imprint.

Being white and being a middle class kid from rural Nottinghamshire the parallels drawn between Cann Ox and what I was experiencing in my day to day life were unfathomably easy to draw… psyche. When rappers Vordul Mega and Vast Aire talked about living in a life of grime, having to fight everyday to survive, it wasn’t just something me and the few buddies that put me on to it rapped along to for comedic effect – we were all too aware of the stylistic lifestyle gulf that lay between the artists and us – it was the combination of producer El-P’s beat centric backdrops and the vehement streetwise poetry that spoke to me personally.

At that age I turned to music a distraction. Yes, I was an uncomfortable teenager, dealing with the plummeting depths of puberty and those type of inconsequential problems that at the time feel like they’ll affect every second of your life. And yes prior to this type of hip hop, I listened to a lot of metal/emo/grunge/deep funk/psych and Tru Thoughts nu jazz. The Cold Vein, with every part of its sharpened delivery, is ice fucking cold and it’s a great transporter. Still now it stirs up a reference for me; a time period where I used to study CD liner notes at every possible juncture, listening with my finger as it trailed across the tiny font of the glossy booklet.

Conceptually the album captured the artistic rebellion, the sense of unrest and the sinister underbelly of life in New York and it remains one of the most lyrically potent works to have tackled that type of subject matter. Like Guardian journalist Dan Hancox wrote when he chose the album for his episode of the ‘My Favourite Album’ feature: “The staccato delivery of “little. black. girl. got. shot.” has the deadpan scansion of a newspaper billboard, while at the other end of the spectrum – and the record – we have the desperate, sky-scraping escapism of ‘Scream Phoenix.’ Vast in particular sounds like the personification of a city and a civilisation at the end of its tether.”

And indeed, the sentiments and emotions on the album are that double edged. The breadth of the duo’s humanity on the album is twofold; on one hand it’s emblazoned and almost futuristically sensationalist and yet on the other it’s incredibly on point, based and brutally emotive. Every part of Vordul and Vast’s tangents are delivered through their uniquely NY hip hop filter; the way they deliver their inspired couplets is cloaked in a certain type of colloquialism, a language that’s inherent to their geography, but throughout the fifteen tracks they deal with topics that everyone can relate to: struggle, stress, lust… They’re everyday notions, that’ve been written and rapped about the world over, but it’s just the way that they’re presented over these dystopian, almost un-melodic, deconstructed soundscapes, that makes the album such an endlessly endearing package.

Words: Oli Marlow