1 out of 5

Label: Matador

Producer: Arsonists

I realize 1 out of 5 is way harsh, and telling about my tastes in hip-hop, but even though I’ve held onto this album for a while, I realize I never listen to it, and upon forcing myself through its 21 tracks a few times in a row (my process for trying to verify I’ve grasped whatever I feel the intent is of what I’m listening to)… ‘As the World Burns’ – and by extension Arsonists – annoy/s me.

Let me say what’s positive about this: the non-freestyled lyrics stumble across a lot of creative slings.  Things that make you smile, or shake your head appreciably at the unique stepping through of rhyming comparisons (the hip-hop fallback structure of saying “blah blah like RHYME A blah blah blah like RHYME b”).  And as was hyped, this was all down in-house, homegrown, and so there is a tape-trading feel to the production, shuffling through tracks and ideas where someone lays down a beat and then people start unleashing their material.  Also, except for those freestyles, the group is pretty good about selective swearing.  I’m an adult with insensitive ears, so I don’t care about parental advisory stickers, but cursing is an easy fallback for rhyming as well (‘fuck’ and its variations always seems to come to mind as a sound-a-like word for a lot of rappers), so it’s nice that these tracks – jam-packed with a lot of non-repeating lines – manage to mostly work around it.  I only sidestep the freestyle because extra dumb rhymes (more perverse, more ‘fuck’s and ‘shit’s and ‘dick’s (yayyy fuck shit dick)) are inevitable.

That being said, there’s a lot of talk about the 4 elements on ‘World,’ and a lot of talk about talk.  And about three tracks that are actually about something.  I expect a certain amount of MC bashing on any hip-hop album, but at a certain point I need a little bit more than just an hour of creative ways to hype yourself or insult someone.  And frankly, 5 MCs at the time of this album… it starts to be a little too much.  Groups with a lot of members are most successful (to my ears) when doing a rotation thing, each person or two taking a track, but Arsonists – on a lot of these bits – give each person a turn, and it just extends the songs a little bit too long, as the choruses don’t do much to break up the monotony of the one-note rhymes and the beats – which start strong and occasionally some type of nifty sound manipulation or sample will pop up later on – the beats end up being mostly pointless, just finding the pace and sticking to it.

On one track, a member briefly reminisces (after dropping mention of the four elements again) about how hip-hop used to be about having fun, and someone here is from the Rocksteady Crew, so y’know, this style is probably not for me.  I’m not down with a lot of classic hip-hop (styles which the group admittedly nails purposefully on a track called “Flashback,” where one rapper ‘time travels’ through different eras) because it’s not fleshed out enough for me, and if that’s Arsonists bag, then I guess that’s that.  But even if it is about being fun, how do you listen to this for an hour?  One or two tracks at a time I agree, the album gets my head nodding from the get-go, but then I just want to turn it off because what’s the point of listening to the same damn joke for 60 minutes?  Even those tracks that do, ever so briefly, flirt with a topic, go off the rails after one or two lines to get back to props.  Not to mention that the freestyles (where it seems like they are actually freestyling and not just reciting remembered bits) aren’t that great.

See?  I’m annoyed.  A bit more awareness of structure would’ve helped shape this into something more than just “They’re from Brooklyn and they did it all themselves!”  Good job.