clipping. – Visions of Bodies Being Burned (2020) (Official digital download 24bit/48kHz)

clipping. – Visions of Burned Bodies (2020)
FLAC (tracks) 24 bit/48 kHz | Time – 52:39 minutes | 644 MB | Genre: Hip-Hop, Rap
Studio Masters, Official Digital Download | Front | © Sub Pop Records

In the horror genre, sequels are superficial. As insufferable movie bro Randy explains in Scream 2, “There are certain rules you have to play by to make a successful sequel. Number one: The body count is always higher. Number two: The death scenes are always more elaborate: more blood, more gore. Carnage candy. And number three: Never, ever, under any circumstances, assume the killer is dead.” On Halloween of last year, LA experimental rap kingpins Clipping ended their three-year hiatus with the horrorcore-inspired There Existed an Addiction to Blood . This October, rapper Daveed Diggs and producers Jonathan Snipes and William Hutson return with an even higher body count, more elaborate kills, and monsters that just won’t stay dead.

Visions of Bodies Being Burned is less a sequel than the second half of a planned diptych. It turns out that Clipping has taken to horrorcore’s thematic material like vampires to the grave. In the years following Splendor & Misery, the band’s acclaimed dystopian sci-fi rape epic, they simply made too many songs for one album. For the release of There Existed an Addiction to Blood, Clipping and Sub Pop Records split the material into two albums, scheduled for release just months apart. However, a global pandemic and multiple canceled tours pushed the release of the project’s “second half” until the following Halloween season.

Visions of Bodies Being Burned contains sixteen more scary stories disguised as rap songs, influenced as much by Ernest Dickerson, Clive Barker, and Shirley Jackson as by Three 6 Mafia, Bone Thugs-N-Harmony, and Brotha Lynch Hung. Clipping is never critical of their cultural references. Their angular, shattered takes on existing musical styles are always reverent, driven by fandom for their object of study rather than contempt for it. Clipping reimagines horrorcore—the wilfully absurdist hip-hop subgenre that flourished in the 1990s—the way Jordan Peele reimagines horror cinema: twisting beloved tropes to make explicit their own radical politics of monstrosity, dread, and the uncanny.

There’s a common saying in film studies that goes: Every era gets the monster it deserves —meaning that during every period in history, different monsters embody the specific sociopolitical anxieties of the time: Bela Lugosi’s Dracula and anti-Semitism, Godzilla and the atomic bomb, Invasion of the Body Snatchers and McCarthyism, Anne Rice’s vampires and the AIDS crisis. While these figures are largely reactionary, Clipping deliberately reimagines their figures of monstrosity through the lens of an anti-racist, anti-patriarchal, anti-colonial politics in order to address the struggles of our current era. The album’s lead single, “Say the Name,” transforms Scarface’s suggestive lyric from “Mind Playing Tricks on Me” – “Candlesticks in the dark, visions of bodies being burner” – into a bolt-on Chicago ghetto house loop that combines a palette of inspirations ranging from ’90s industrial music to a certain mirror-bound, bee-keeping, hook-handed former slave/urban legend. The second single, “’96 Neve Campbell,” pays homage to the self-aware “final girl” trope of the post-slasher cycle, with Inglewood’s Cam & China proving they’re doing more than outlive the masked killer – they’re preemptively kicking his ass.

The band also reached out to fellow noise-rap pioneers Ho99o9 for the track “Looking Like Meat,” which sounds more like the full-on sonic assault of Clipping’s first album, Midcity, than anything they’ve done since. Among Clipping’s peers, Ho99o9 prove to be the perfect collaborators to fit into the album’s thematic universe, with Eaddy and theOGM delivering the most unhinged, viscerally alarming moment on the entire record.

Each track fuses a different expression of horror with one of Clipping’s signature metamorphosed takes on a hip-hop subgenre. “Eaten Alive” pays homage to Tobe Hooper’s film of the same name, recreating the swampy drag of No Limit and its ilk on a jagged jazz-rap instrumental featuring Tortoise guitar genius Jeff Parker and experimental LA drummer Ted Byrnes. “Enlacing” imagines Lovecraftian cosmic terror as the result of a psychedelic drift into nothingness, played as a slushy, cloud-like rap haze. “Pain Everyday” deploys actual EVP recordings—said to be the voices of restless spirits—atop a cinematic, Venetian Snares-esque breakcore collage as a call to arms for the spirits of lynchings to haunt the white descendants of their killers. And “Check the Lock” is a spiritual sequel to Seagram’s classic song “Sleepin in My Nikes,” which chronicles a drug lord’s paranoid descent into madness.

While There Existed an Addiction to Blood ended in an all-purifying fire, Visions of Bodies Being Burned ends with daybreak in a forest, offering false hope that those who have survived the horror thus far might be safe for good. The closing track, “Secret Piece,” is a rendition of a 1953 Yoko Ono lyric score that instructs the players to “Decide on one note you want to play/Play it with this accompaniment: the forest from 5 in the morning till 8 in the morning in the summertime,” and features nearly all of the musicians who appeared on both albums.

Since their last album, the group’s Tony and Grammy Award-winning rapper Daveed Diggs has starred in the TNT sci-fi series Snowpiercer, voiced a character in Pixar’s Soul and played Frederick Douglass in Showtime’s The Good Lord Bird. Author Rivers Solomon’s novella, based on Clipping’s Hugo-nominated song “The Deep,” has been nominated for Nebula, Hugo and Locus Awards, and won the Lambda Literary Award for Best LGBTQ SF/Fantasy/Horror Novel. Clipping’s song “Chapter 319” — a tribute to George Floyd (AKA Big Floyd), the former DJ-Screw rapper who was killed by police officers in May 2020 — was released on Bandcamp on June 19 and has raised over $20,000 for racial justice charities. A clip of the song also became a popular meme on TikTok, spawning over 50,000 videos featuring left-wing teenagers rapping the song’s lyrics (“Donald Trump is a white supremacist, period…”) directly into the frowning faces of their conservative parents. The band also contributed a Skinny Puppy-esque rework of J-Kwon’s “Tipsy” to Save Stereogum: An ‘00s Covers Comp.

For Record Store Day 2020, Clipping released Double Live, a collaboration with sound artist Christopher Fleeger. All of the audio was recorded during Clipping’s 2017 tour supporting the Flaming Lips, but the microphones weren’t pointed at the band. Instead, microphones were placed in toilets, taped to ceiling pipes, tied to trees, carried by roadies, and hidden throughout venues. The results were then lip-synced and edited for over a year. Double Live is perhaps more of a musique concrète experiment than a traditional live album. On The Tonight Show, Jimmy Fallon said it sounded “weird.”

In his “Album of the Week” review for Stereogum, Tom Breihan described There Existed an Addiction to Blood as “cold, confrontational music even when it punches, which it often does.” Visions of Bodies Being Burned punches even more than its predecessor, though perhaps the only club it’ll do so in is the burnt-out, radiation-poisoned rave of some sci-fi dystopia. On their new album, Clipping expands on the language of their already revolutionary music while still rattling the trunks of dilapidated hearses and demon-possessed Plymouth Furies. Never, ever, under any circumstances, assume the killer is dead.

Number list:

1-1. clipping. – Intro (02:20)

1-2. clipping. – Say the name (04:59)

1-3. cutting. – Wytchboard (Interlude) (00:30)

1-4. clipping. – ’96 Neve Campbell (with Cam & China) (03:21)

1-5. cut. – A little below (02:35)

1-6. clipping. – Kill Them (04:06)

1-7. clipping. – She Bad (03:26)

1-8. clipping. – Invocation (Interlude) (with Greg Stuart) (01:12)

1-9. clipping. – Pain Everyday (with Michael Esposito) (03:39)

1-10. cut. – Check the lock (03:37)

1-11. clipping. – In search of meat (feat. Ho99o9) (03:29)

1-12. clipping. – Drove (Interlude) (00:51)

1-13. clipping. – Eaten Alive (with Jeff Parker & Ted Byrnes) (05:41)

1-14. clipping. – Body for the Pile (with disease) (04:24)

1-15. cut. – Enlacing (04:43)

1-16. clipping. – Secret Piece (03:40)

Download: