Restiform Bodies: TV Loves You Back [Anticon; 2008] Rating: 7.1
California is a big state. And hip-hop aficionados, with their firm sense of place, tie Oakland to a unique style of rap that bears little resemblance to its famous counterpart in Los Angeles. The brightest lights of the Bay Area, E-40 and Too $hort, never fully bought into the dark, trigger-happy sensationalism of the Death Row artists: Guns simply weren't part of their vision of, or path to, the good life. Emphasizing the joy of letting loose, the hyphy movement that sprang up a few years ago only cemented the scene's drama-free outlook. But Oakland's Restiform Bodies are agitators. And what better place for this hall of modest fame-- the indie-rap supergroup of Passage, Bomaar Monk, and Telephone Jim Jesus-- than Anticon? Their debut on the label, TV Loves You Back, presents a furious, righteous, and not entirely subtle dissatisfaction with capitalism. Thanks to the recent tumult in the world's markets, the album, like the DNC platform, has an added punch of timeliness. To be fair, mindless consumerism is more the target here than, say, overly leveraged banks. In short, the rappers mount their attack on low culture, not high finance. "Consumer Culture Wave" suggests a fight-the-Man mission with its title. Luckily, the song is better than that, too gloriously strange and oblique to be pressed into the service of jam-band leftism. (Love and gender seem to be the real subject, anyway.) Better to revel in the fluorescent textures and spastic rhythms, an accurate evocation of life in the attention-deficient multimedia slipstream, than to grope for political provocations in the lyrics. After all, it would have sufficed to attack QVC in only one song, you'd think. Docking too many points here isn't fair, anyway: Laid out on the page, even the best songs forfeit their essence. But when you spit nonsense with the apocalyptic ferocity of El-P, in many ways the hyperpolitical white rapper's template, that nonsense may as well be scripture. Ever eager to disquiet, the Bodies even stoke the listener's anxieties about machines (on the sludgy, horror-string-laced "Pick It Up, Drop It") and modern medicine ("Ameriscan"). If there's a paranoid style in American hip-hop, this may be its purest expression. Nodding to the post-Thanksgiving virus that turns the lanes of Wal-Mart into the Ben-Hur chariot race, "Black Friday" bounces between drum'n'bass speed and trip-hop languor to manic-depressively link consumerism and domestic life. That the Bodies lean on everything from the New Romantics to crunk to post-rock to ghettotech to paint this cultural self-portrait only amplifies the strangeness-- and accuracy-- of TV Loves You Back. "Movies are for entertainment," Louis B. Mayer famously stated. "If you want to send a message, send a telegram." The role of art isn't quite that narrow, of course, but the legendary producer knew that audiences didn't want to be lectured. And sadly that's what a lot of independent rap does. The Restiform Bodies avoid this. As Passage put it: "All the information on TV Loves You Back is stuff I'm trying to make peace with as a person, and that I think we all have to make peace with as a society." That sums up why the record is not only digestible, but outright luscious. We're not watching a presentation or reading a complaint. We're not being condemned for watching "The Hills". We're living, for a YouTube minute, inside three minds warped and wracked by our national addiction to the screen. It's equal parts unsightly and arresting in the way that most pathologies are.
"Prenez et écoutez, ceci est mon corps..."
16/07/2008 - posté par Newton
Sept ans après l'inauguration de leur discographie via un étrange premier album qui transcende les genres, le trio originaire de New Hampshire Restiform Bodies refait surface le 16 septembre prochain pour une seconde mouture intitulée "TV Loves You Back" à paraître chez Anticon. Une pochette formée de brics et de brocs, d'un enchevêtrement d'étranges dessins aux couleurs vives qui témoigne de la multiplicité d'expériences pour chaque membre de ce corps à nouveau uni et recomposé.
Depuis 2001, pour The Bomarr Monk, Passage et Telephone Jim Jesus, mener sa barque en solitaire a constitué l'unique chemin à emprunter avant de se retrouver en 2008. Pour le premier d'entre eux, architecte de la production, un chapelet d'albums à mettre à son actif parmi lesquels "Freedom From Frightened Air" et "Scraps" sortis l'année passée, un entrelacs d'instrus personnelles et de remixes d'artistes divers et variés. Entre temps, la voix particulière de Passage s'est quand à elle distinguée sur "The Forcefield Kids" en 2004 pour le compte du label à la fourmi. A leurs côtés, Telephone Jim Jesus est apparu comme le membre le plus en vue puisqu'il compte déjà deux albums à son actif, "A Point Too Far To Astronaut" en 2004 suivi du très plaisant "Anywhere Out Of The Everything" 3 ans après.
'Bobby Trend Addendum', premier extrait disponible, est en écoute sur la page Myspace du trio.
[...]
Restiform Bodies strike back after a seven year absence with the brightness turned up to 11.
Their classic self titled album and it's successor 'Sun Hop Flat' were sonic assaults that took influences from all over. As at ease with epic ambient oddness than with 80's electro wigged out rap work outs, their distinct attack on music saw the albums being picked up by Anticon's (now defunct) '6Months' Distribution and later led to all three members (Bomarr, Passage, Telephone Jim Jesus) releasing solo projects for the label.
This track is a first taste of their long anticipated first album for Anticon and it doesn't disappoint. The beat bursts out with a serious bounce that gets progressively more fucked up as the seconds pass. Passage's raps snarl and drawl over the track, he sounds confident with his disgust and the chorus recalls an amateur dramatics lament for consumer culture.
[...]
'T.V Loves You Back' is released 30th September and I can't wait to hear it.
"Bobby Trendy Addendum" review [Express Night Out]
7/17/08
BAND: Restiform Bodies
SONG/ALBUM: "Bobby Trendy Addendum" | "TV Loves You Back"
SOUNDS LIKE: A Tribe Called Quest doing a new wave version of an Atmosphere rap
D.C. BOUND: Bomarr, Telephone Jim Jesus and Passage have only recently reformed, but once the album drops on Sept. 30 look for the trio to hit the road.
WITH singer Mike Busse from Chronic future (The Future Lords) and musical act & producer Ryan Breen aka Back Ted N-Ted.
Their sound is very electronic oriented but still hip hop. 3 tracks are now playing on their space: "Special Education", "Tight Mag", "The Summer of 1980". Apparently this collab is nothing new, two of the tracks being from 2005. Is it still going on ?
Seven years, numerous solo projects, and a lot of music has happened since we last saw a release from Resitorm Bodies, whose self-titled debut album dropped in 2001. Now, Bomarr, Telephone Jim Jesus, and Passage have reunited as a collective and are unleashing TV Loves You Back, their first proper release since hiatus and their debut record for Oakland, CA-based imprint anticon. Equal parts hip-hop, pop, and new wave, the new album carries a distinctly dark feel to it, with heavy, ghettotech-style bass and lyrics spit over the mic at an aggressive pace. "Bobby Trendy Addendum" takes a bitter stab at impulse buying and nightly, fear-mongering news programs (which, according to this track, are somehow linked), and is a good introduction to this cult group's sound.
Seven years later, the beast stirs. In the gap that followed Restiform Bodies’ genre-crushing self-titled LP (and companion piece, SunHopFlat), much did happen, and several records of those times were made. Bomarr holed up in Oakland, mastering his hypno-bounce sound (Freedom From Frightened Air, 2007). Telephone Jim Jesus roamed Europe, collecting etherea previously unexcavated (Anywhere Out Of The Everything, 2007). Passage went solo (The Forcefield Kids, 2004), and then to hell and back. In 2008, the three-headed post-mod monster called Restiform Bodies is whole once again. And, at long last, the RBs drop their official Anticon debut like a sack of analog televisions onto the fractured landscape of modern urban forms.
TV Loves You Back is a dark and dense, art-twisted, New Wave-inflected hip-pop marvel born of our overstimulated era. Musically, it stands alone, which is to say it fits perfectly within the Anticon oeuvre. Strains of ghettotech, crunk, and hyphy twirp and twirl with Eno-like atmospherics and buoyant bass swells, while rapper/songbird Passage warps his vocals over blistering synth. Likewise, the lyrics gallop at a ferocious clip. Like electron shots from a cathode ray tube, they combine to form a deliciously sardonic image of modern living, and break down into constituents that are metaphysically hopeful, socially relevant, poetic, and playful.
Fittingly, opener “Black Friday” begins with 30 seconds of ominous Top 40 rap bluster (crowd cheers and wonky, reverbed “uhhs”), forcing the Restiform tongue through its cheek before launching into a track that traverses burbling synth bounce, doubletime drum ‘n’ bass, and free-floating atmosphere. Passage forges the vocals to match-laidback rap, unlikely falsettos, rapid-fire couplets, a chorus of bent melodies-while tempering his words into a poignant evocation of the mind of a mall shooter hitting his prime.
Our narrator too is in top form, next styling over the wamping, squirilly club beat of “Foul,” then navigating the chopped white noise and guitar of “A Pimp-like God.” And when “Panic Shopper” creeps in like a vintage horrorcore tune, painting a QVC-inspired nightmare in stream-of-consciousness strokes (”Look at you vibrating, bent-necked, bowed-head/PS3 building-jumping panic shopper/Launch off
the parking garage/In a Tony Robbins murder-suicide with infomercial knives…”), it’s clear that Restiform Bodies have made something as enjoyable as it is topically thick.
“Consumer Culture Wave” details a crux theme: the supplantation of sexual urge with purchasing power. And on “Bobby Trendy Addendum,” Passage adopts a Brooklyn sneer to bang out bitter satire atop a lo-bit mélange. He connects impulse buying to nightly news fear-mongering here, then traces our need to be placated by prizes to a childhood pastime in “Pick It Up, Drop It.” “Interactive Halloween Bear” is classic Restiform-surging synths, crystalline overtones, bassy blips, snapping drums-overrun by a rich imagery that seems to portend societal collapse onto the living-room couch.
But before all descends into chaos, TV Loves You Back hits back with the sixminute-long climax, “Opulent Soul.” Passage burns through a Gary Numan-esque laissez faire croon, cocksure rhymes, and a distorted Knife-like nastiness while the music intensifies like a thunderstorm of seething digitalia. He crescendos with a 32- bar rap rife with quips (”When Ty says ‘move that bus’/It just cleans my ducts”) and affecting observation (”Round and round goes the collection plate/And ain’t defeat a wicked virus, how it lives to repeat?”), and by song’s end, our hero reclaims his humanity from the bottom of circuit pile.
TV Loves You Back comes to a quiet close with “Ameriscan,” a bittersweet lullaby about cancer recognition technology. It’s an ending that only Restiform Bodies could pull off, but it’s also perfectly apropos for an album so focused on the comforts that bring chaos into our daily lives.
Restiform Bodies
Restiform Bodies - TV Loves You Back (Anticon)
Street Date: Sept. 30, 2008
01 Black Friday
02 Foul
03 A Pimp-like God
04 Panic Shopper
05 Consumer Culture Wave
06 Bobby Trendy Addendum
07 Pick it up, Drop it
08 Interactive Halloween Bear
09 Opulent Soul
10 Ameriscan
Don't hold me to this, but this new track from anticon oddities Restiform Bodies is about modern spoiled American rich-twit privilege. I think. Evocative, sometimes inventive phrases jump out-- "Fendi bag and an icy chalice," "Pony every birthday regardless of our behavior," "Appetites lashed to the hood of the Bentley"-- and even the parts that are hard to follow, pauseless strings of ideas that keep canceling out each preceding phrase at a rate of something like two per second, are more attention-grabbing than bewildering. But if they connect to each other in any distinctly narrative way, it's kind of hard to figure out exactly how. That could be part of the appeal, or at least whatever appeal there is that doesn't otherwise rely on the beat-- a constantly-mutating slab of yowling, pounding synthesized clamor that does a good enough job invoking the kind of ugliness you'd want from an abstract rap track about moneyed arrogance. That super-tongue-in-cheek 1980s Euro-pop chorus is crazier still.
Restiform Bodies:
