drwg (which incidentally is the Welsh word for "bad"), is a hip hop hoagie stuffed with grey matter and meaty beats and smothered in tasty synths, a monster grinder that will bite you in the face before you get a change to sink your teeth into it. Comprised of former Beak> sound scavenger Matt Loveridge aka MXLX who brings the venomous elixir that was brewed on his last release Serpent to the magic stew of drwg with punctual punctuating synths that keep time with the sparse, leaky rhythms of former Foot Village footman Brian Miller, and which serve up feedback and counterpoints to the dark, slippery flow of resident linguist Rhys Langston, who provides deathbeam like commentary from the mind-fortress of his intellect, against the society that exiled him to this sanctuary of satirical solitude. Also, at some point, John Dieterich of Deerhoof showed up to do some guitars. His work here really doesn't stand out in any notable way, but the fact that he's there in the mix is some fun trivia, don't you think?
Langston literally released a book on the use of hip hop lyricism as an activist force and a kind of praxis earlier this year, and his poignant, if at times absurdist, analytic approach is suffused throughout the album. The first point at which the substance of his social critiques hit me on this release was on the "Ballad of A Fading Mumble Rapper," which gives a kind of abridged history of underground rap over the past 10 years. The song begins with the near implosion of pop rap in the late '00s, through the cultural cratering of Robin Thicke's "Blurred Lines," up through the rise of mumble and sound cloud rap, genres that ascended in opposition to the overculture, only to have its aesthetics recuperated by it, with the people who made the genre viable pushed back into the margins of the gutter. An arch that is related with a collegiate tone, too piss-taking for words to adequately appreciate. More abstract verbiage symbiotically spars with the squawky flock of synth shifts and sneaky, clackity beats on "I'm Dressed in Ghost Meat (Snapping Like Crab Legs)," but inscrutability is really just a cover for deeper truths, as proved on the loaded layup and drill of "Black Joints Matter (Arthroscopic Exercise No. 27)," and the humanity-adrift harmonizations of the beautifully, oblivion seeking, cache purging, doom scroll of "For I Scroll (Note to Singular Self on Internal Storage)."There is a lot to unpack on drwg and I'm still unraveling its folds inside my own mind like a riddle whose answer is the question itself. Thank god this EP is so short because you'll want to listen to it multiple times to really let it sink in. It's both a comparatively smooth, and enjoyable listen, and an album that will give you the mental roughage to break down some of the mysteries in your life. Or should I say, this drwg ain't no drag.
