Beans – End It All

Beans is a bit of a strange chap. No, strange is too strong a word. Perhaps individual is better, in the sense that he avoids styles of hip-hop with the trappings of glitz, glamour, and the hustle of some New York rap. Instead, being more of a modern day beat-poet, his work with Antipop Consortium bordered as much on inventiveness as it did near insanity. I still regret putting on Arrhythmia for some friends after a heavy night out: the ping-pong balls and abstract sounds really didn’t help some with the hangovers.

Somewhat terminally titled End It All, this is Beans’ fourth solo album, and also marks a break from the reunion of Antipop Consortium and their 2009 release Fluorescent Black. I had lost track of what both Beans and Antipop Consortium had been up to in recent years, and what drew me to this was the focus on guest producers such as Four Tet, Clark, and Tobacco. These collaborators create a wealth of different platforms to which Beans and his unmistakable vocal delivery can skip around, from the fizzing sounds of ‘Glass Coffins’, the aggressive overdriven beats of ‘Blue Movie’ to the mechanical and melodic ‘Mellow You Out’. Melody is sparsely investigated in an album that could be looked at as slightly intimidating or aggressive, especially on ‘Anvil Falling’ and the stripped down ‘Hardliner’.

This is perhaps due to End It All being a brief album. At around 33 minutes it can feel hurried and disjointed. On some tracks such as ‘Air Is Free’, Beans’ vocals sound detached from the music below him, and on others his rhymes to drift above or around the music. In this minor way it can feel off-putting, but then I would expect nothing less from the man who often strays from the norm, and it doesn’t detract from an album that although is decent enough, it is just crying out for a few more tracks.