3 out of 5

Label: Fill in the Breaks

Produced by: Ecid

I flip-flopped on this rating a few time between great and less-than-great, so, as usually happens, I shrugged and went down the middle.

Ecid would seem to be one of the (if not the) main masterminds behind Fill in the Breaks, and indie hip-hop label that seems to want to veer toward Rhymesayers legitimacy (whose Atmosphere Ecid occasionally sounds like) but often, from what I’ve sampled, the lyrical output comes closer to the backpack stylings of Anticon.  I see Ecid’s as producer on a lot of FitB, and the fanciful, panicked opener ‘I hope you get the postcard’ is an exciting, if uneven opener to the disc: slightly electronic, off-kilter beats with boggling layers as the narrative kicks up.  The ‘story’ – maybe about a plane going down – is stilted, which turns out to be a pattern of Ecid’s – but it’s also indicative of his better tendencies when they’re present, of just telling a story quickly and off-hand.  The artist has a very staccato, articulate delivery that makes you hear the words even if you aren’t listening; he’s not particularly fast or clever, just concise, so the less time he spends trying to make a point or hoping for a catchy chorus, the better the track tends to work.

How well the next track works for you will determine whether or not the remaining 13 tracks will.  Coming off of ‘postcard,’ ‘Paper Shredder Savior’ has a much more accessible, head-bobbing beat and recognizable chorus / verse.  …And then the following track, ‘Re-Seeding Skyline’ somewhat repeats the shtick.  Hip-hop suffers from this quite a bit: your backing track or chorus can make a huge difference in identifying the track, especially – as with Ecid – if you’re delivery tends to stick to one pace.  ‘Skyline’ and ‘Savior’ exchange keys or sound effects, but are otherwise super similar structurally, and neither has such a clear theme that you want to read a lyric sheet.  ‘If Only You Were John Denver’ sounds different, using a sparser beat with looped vocals; however, it gets stuck on Ecid’s tendency to defeat his own flow.  It’s an odd technique, like he supposes that suddenly ending a line without a rhyme or off-pace will make the lyric stick out, but here and elsewhere it just gives the track a hiccuppy feel.  And again, combined with average lines, it brings attention where catchier production could carry you through.

And so we go around and around.  Following ‘Denver’ is another solid, head-bobbing track – ‘Moodswing Posterchild,’ and then one of the highlights of the disc, that comes closer to Atmosphere snark – ‘Crook Cologne’ (“If hip-hip were really dead there’d be no one complaining about it”) – before stuttering again on the over-stuffed ‘No One’s Complaining…’  So most of this is good, and very occasionally something to make you stop and want to hear more, and then it’ll defeat itself either through a forced vibe or too much repetition.  But it doesn’t turn me off Ecid.  He’s had a bucketful of releases he’s touched since this disc, so there’s definitely enough of value here to make me wonder if, in that bucket, I’ll find that he’s helped shape a couple gems.  (Just like that sentence – a GEM.)