RFI : cLOUDDEAD, N*E*R*D

I wouldn't categorize the two together but...

cLouddead: Imagine a couple white guys reciting Allen Ginsberg's "Howl" rapidly over murky beats that have no beginning middle or end.

N*E*R*D: The Neptunes' own songs. Hardhitting keyboard grooves with a little too much of that synth-electric-guitarish spy sound on the album. Lots of singing about sex and things.

Generally for prog-hop you can check the whole Anticon catalogue. Dose- 1, Buck 65, Sole, and all those weirdos. If you sidestep you can find the much-celebrated glitch hop like Prefuse 73 and Kid 606's fuck-up- rap-music mixes.

cLOUDHEAD, what I've heard, pretty decent spaced-out hip-hop (it's still lingering at the bottom of my wishlist). N*E*R*D, some excellent hard tracks (Laptop, Truth or Dare), some hybrids between hip-hop and 60s hippie stuff (good: Am I High, Run to the Sun. bad: Brain) oh yeah and that Stereolab-style outro, which is cool. What the the Doctor needs is: Cannibal Ox. Can't go wrong there. They built spaceships.

clouddead and nerd both kind of suffer from the same problem - they don't really hold up over an entire album. clouddead mixes lots of stuff, but in essence it's almost surrealist prog hip-hop with weird interjections of country music, ambience, indie rock, etc slashing into their songs. such as they are. worth a listen, and there's some really solid tracks, but you're better off starting with deep puddle dynamics (where dose's bizarre voice is better used) and then slowly moving towards clouddead via them (dose project) or the anticon gigasingle.

nerd... i have to say i was disappointed. i like the slightly psychedelic elements in some songs, but overall it's kind of irritating in how samey it is. maybe when the re-recorded version comes out it'll add in some of the curtis mayfield funk/soul i was hoping would show up. i'd recommend downloading some mp3s before buying.

YNF is on the money with cLOUDDEAD. The album becomes very samey after a while and the very short length of some of the tracks doesn't help. It's a shame, because in short doses they are very good indeed. I reckon if I'd stumbled on one of the original 12"s last year I would have proclaimed them to be the best thing evah, but as it is they're merely pretty good.