In Shakespeare’s Much Ado About Nothing, knavish protagonist Benedick Mountanto famously groans, “I was not born under a rhyming planet,” which is Bardspeak for “I can’t rap to save my hindquarters.”
Signor Benedick The Moor doesn’t have this problem. He may take his name from the Shakespeare character, but the Californian musician definitely doesn’t suffer from lyrical dysfunction. Armed with a propensity for double-time sprays and a nasal, ever-so-slightly strident delivery that could easily be mistaken for Danny Brown’s, Benedick made a compelling case for himself as a rapper with his first mixtape, last September’s absurd, ambitious El Negro. But as sbthemoor, his first-ever physical release, makes abundantly clear: the twisted universes of this man’s mind do not subscribe to conventional modes of description, “rap” included.
Oh, you want to pull out the labels? Have fun with that — somewhere between the melodramatic baroque strings, the krautrock freak-outs, and the Fred Durst-style punches to the face… I lost track of my adjectives. Not that you’ll have any use for them in this brave new world, where kids dice up bullies on the street just like in Skyrim, and leave their bodies to be found by the drifters and the womanizers and the hawkers and the heart breakers. Scary stuff, but it slithers forth with such a goofy grin on it’s face that you can’t help but get drawn in. A rhyming planet, indeed.
sbthemoor is out on Deathbomb Arc now.
• Deathbomb Arc: http://deathbombarc.bandcamp.com
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