More by Armand Hammer. Furtive Movements. Future Former Rapper. Favors Are Bad News. More Armand Hammer. Listen to Paraffin now. You look like someone who appreciates good music. Listen to all your favourite artists on any device for free or try the Premium trial. 119 THE DEADITE 119 races toward Ash, leaps into the air and comes down with a kneedrop onto Ash's. He thrusts out his arm and the chainsaw ROARS to life! 251 THE EVIL FORCE 251 Hammers at the door of the Shed. 273 ASH 273 lights the fire with his Zippo lighter and huddles near the flame for warmth.
For Your Consideration: Top Ten: RATE Voting: Essentials Listening Club: & 2010-14 Chart: The latest albums, videos, news, and anything else indie music related from your favorite artists. THE NEW RULES Please read the before posting, UPDATED MARCH 2018. Weekly Schedule Check out the Daily Music Discussion every day of the week! Mo - General Discussion, Top Ten Results Tu - Top Ten Tuesday, For Your Consideration We - General Discussion Th - (bi)Weekly Suggestions Fr - What have you been listening to?, New Music Friday Sa - General Discussion, Best Music You Discovered This Week Su - Weekly Suggestions Indieheads Community Top FRESH Posts: / Best of the Year Results: Similar Subs Other Subs of interest. Hey everyone, welcome back to our continuing album of the year series. Today, writes to us on the latest collab album between legendary rappers Billy Woods and Elucid under the Armand Hammer moniker, Paraffin. Artist: Album: Listen Background by It’s hard to say that any music scene is benefiting more from the internet age than underground hip-hop.
Of course, the elimination of genre boundaries and the growing eclecticism of modern audiences is a benefit to music in general, it’s hard to argue that everybody is beginning to take more pride in their taste, trying to carve out a specific niche to inhabit. Funnily enough the once insular world of hip-hop is, arguably, experiencing the most integration when it comes to once foreign sounds and genres. No longer do we live in a world where you choose between boom bap, g-funk, jazz rap, trap, etc., no longer is sound restricted to the East Coast, West Coast and a handful of other specified locations.
Perhaps it’s because of the the guerilla-ish, punk sensibility that hip-hop continues to adopt in the modern age, that allows growth and expansion in seemingly unnatural directions while delivering a very natural result. Whether it be JPEGMAFIA or Clipping creating beats out of industrial scratches and ratchets, or Earl Sweatshirt and Mike holding up a mirror to the prototypical “mumble rapper” languidly reciting bars that hide wit and profound intelligence behind a detached murmur. Hip-hop is experiencing the same divergence that other formerly niche genres had to endure and down those long forking passageways, in an alley obscured by shadows, that’s where you’ll find Armand Hammer. Billy Woods and Elucid have both spent the better part of the aughts taking advantage of this newfound freedom in genre. Both are prolific rappers with iconoclastic sounds, both have mysterious and introverted demeanors; Billy Woods doesn’t even show his face online, but the biggest rift between the two is in terms of experience. Woods, the elder statesmen of the two, was born in Washington DC to a Jamaican mother and Zimbabwean father - between the years of 1981 and 1995 he lived in Rhodesia. After moving back to the States and attending Howard University, Woods was introduced to the legendary Vordul Mega (of Cannibal Ox).
Vordul offered him a chance to record a guest verse at the legendary Electric Ladyland Studios, but Woods faced a hostile entourage and sound engineer. Woods left and vowed that he “had a perspective and something to say that was different from other people.” The fact that Def Jux; THE definitive underground hip-hop label, effectively shut Woods out is a testament to his outsider nature. In the early 2000s Woods founded his label Backwoodz Studioz, released his debut record Camouflage in 2003, and started building the shadowy monopoly we know him for.
Elucid, on the other hand, has also been active for most of this century, but didn’t start amassing a large following until his Bandcamp started gaining traction back in 2008. Since then, he’s become more of a household name in underground hip-hop, collaborating frequently with artists such as milo, Uncommon Nasa, and Woods.
He gained a reputation for his intricate, stream-of-consciousness style that hearkens back to similarly verbose MCs such as El-P and Aesop Rock. But Elucid has a little more fire inside of him, more of an incendiary nature, a knack for profundity and radical politics. It wasn’t until a Backwoodz Studioz event known as Yule-Prog that the two met, and eventually came together as Armand Hammer in 2013 to release their debut; Race Music.
Together as Armand Hammer, Paraffin marks Woods and Elucid’s third full-length collaboration. Review by I like my hip-hop dirty, I like it grimy, not to say I don’t like various other styles of hip-hop, but I think there’s a very preternatural catharsis that hip-hop fans feel when they hear something like Paraffin. It’s the same feeling I got after listening to Mobb Deep’s The Infamous, and Big L’s Lifestylez ov da Poor & Dangerous for the first time. In more recent years projects coming from Griselda Records and Danny Brown have also given me this feeling, something between fear and incendiary rage. Paraffin is not the main event, it’s the alley next door. It’s not the nightclub, it’s the smoke and obscenities drifting past the dim lights. This record is a renegade, a shadowy figure - not evil, but honest.
Woods and Elucid take it upon themselves as a pair of dark harbingers, shouting, conspiring, meticulously deconstructing, and warning their listeners in a sort of fugue state that I can only describe as grimy, hazy, and jazzy. Opener Sweet Micky and the following two tracks Rehearsal With Ornette and Dettol set the tone with ominous walls of sound that seem all encompassing.
Some brass appears on the latter two tracks, an occasional sour horn flourish on Rehearsal With Ornette while Dettol incorporates a languid sax melody throughout the entire beat. The duo paint a profoundly disorienting image of paranoia and violence, not conjuring the image of a jazz club, but the dingy alley next door, where you hear an occasional note ring out the door. “All that he seen burnt a whole in his brain/ Only came back to tell them bout the fucking flames” Woods sings on the refrain of Rehearsal With Ornette in an image vaguely reminiscent of Death Grips. To bring up Death Grips for a moment, (I know, please bare with me) I’ve always thought it odd that more comparisons weren’t drawn between Woods and MC Ride. I’ve always heard a distinct Billy Woods influence on MC Ride specifically, and MC Ride is the only other ‘rapper’ I’ve ever heard that utilized the shouty, stream-of-consciousness, style that I so attribute to Woods work.
On top of that, the sheer paranoia and oppressive atmosphere of Paraffin is akin to something you’d hear from a Death Grips record, so I don’t think it’s an altogether ridiculous comparison, but still I digress. Other tracks like the ice-cold Hunter whose beat could shatter someone’s skull and the freakish If He Holla which utilizes a warped, looping vocal sample to create something surprisingly unsettling, continue to build a thoroughly grim and visceral atmosphere, allowing a fully realized world of corruption and conspiracy to emerge through Woods’ semi-absurdist, unpredictable flow and Elucid’s surgically precise lyrics and production style. Hunter, specifically, is structured immaculately, as the intro features a lengthy Elucid verse where he details an iconoclastic lifestyle of poverty and wealth, speaking of ghetto games and mansions, before a dissonant hum and drum machine that could flatten mountains send the song into orbit. Not to say the entire album is doom and gloom, Elucid and Billy Woods are both rappers who should be praised for their senses of humor as well as their technical skill and profundity.
Billy Woods is a ridiculous rapper, you’d be hard pressed to find someone who sounds like him, much less raps like him. He’s got a distinct style, but just look at his first verse on Alternate Side Parking, the levity of the beat change infusing his verse as he performs what sounds more like spoken word than hip-hop, “Peace? / Not this evening, it’s not even close to evening / no rhyme or reason, just open season.” Elucid is typically a little more veiled with his humor, hiding the wit and humor of his bars behind a thesaurus, but that doesn’t stop his quotables from rising to the top anyway. In fact, on the funky, lo-fi, psychedelia of Black Garlic, Elucid drops a particularly seething and simultaneously hilarious bar, “DJ Vlad big boss at the end of the internet/ Whitesplainin' uncle tom preachers to disinterested black women/Rootless rap a Ceaser in a plane/ Lil Wanye acoustic cover of a Sign of the Times.” The production on this thing lives up to the star caliber of the duo as well, diverse and eclectic yet entirely cohesive. While Elucid produced a majority of these tracks you might recognize Kenny Segal from the two absolutely golden beat switches on the futuristic ECOMOG, and the mellow, jazzy Alternate Side Parking. I would be remiss if I didn’t mention the closing two tracks as well, which in my mind cemented the duo as more than just the sum of their parts. After forty or so minutes of an angry, conspiratorial onslaught, we’re given Sudden Death and Root Farm.
Sudden Death is a stunning piece of hip-hop that floored me during my first lesson: because of the production. That flute sample is INCREDIBLE. It’s a song that has a borderline tribal/primal simplicity and appeal, as there’s little more than a flute, the duo making guttural noises, and a few verses. Then Root Farm comes to close the record out, with some emotions you may not have expected to feel during the run time of the album: sadness, more specifically hopelessness, as the two quietly wax poetic on race in the modern day. Elucid’s refrain of 'Lowkey oppressors call me brother” paints the vivid picture you need of the duo, two people pushed to the very edge by a world that doesn’t allow them to exist as they are. And yet they continue to THRIVE. So listen to Paraffin, especially if you want to exist on Billy Wood’s and Elucid’s terms.
My favorite album of 2018, period. The production on here is genius. That horn sample-into-feedback combo that repeats through Rehearse with Ornette was in my head all year.