Published on Jul 16, 2004
Dammit, I don’t LIKE hip-hop. This is one of those ironclad
personal rules of mine. So I’m offended that Bay Area
rap/punk/reggae/hip-hop outfit El Jefe has dared to have the
audacity to lay down some tracks that even I, a hopelessly uncool,
unfly, and unhip music journalist can enjoy. Because, O Ye DV
Faithful, El Jefe rocks. Their debut disc,
El Jefe’s Amorphous Phormula, is probably going to appear on
my year-end Top Ten, thereby fulfilling one of the signs of the
coming apocalypse. Meanwhile, however, let’s enjoy it, shall
we?
El Jefe is a five-piece band, and all five pieces are
astonishingly good. Fernando Cardoso lays down serious drum beats
as a foundation, Peter Lazarus plays a mean bass, Ken Bryant’s
guitar flickers from genre to genre with astonishing felicity, and
the twin vocals of Darren Reid and Carlos Gonzalez are brilliant,
bridging the gap between rap and spoken-word with an almost
beat-poet sensibility. Add in a myriad of fun, unexpected
flourishes, and you have something that transcends normal,
run-of-the-mill hip-hop like nothing you’ve ever heard before.
Sometimes El Jefe puts me in mind of serious old school poets like
KRS-One, and it’s no mistake perhaps that they’ve opened for him.
El Jefe is who quasi-poseurs like Limp Bizkit want to be, and thank
the gods they’re around. Amorphous Phormula is tribal chants for
tribes that meet under highway overpasses, and whose shamanic
fetishes include subway tokens and stoplights.
As such, this is a very very cool CD. Tracks worthy of note
include the horn-laden “Intro,” the surprisingly deep “1/2 Self,
1/2 Expression,” the street poet’s hallucination of “Nightmare On
Cesar Chavez Road,” and the shamanic journey of “Mushroombeat.” The
high point, by far, is the oddly gentle “Weather Radio,” whose
piano (yes, I said piano) puts me in mind of Radiohead or other
dark progressive groups. Toss in samples from the National Weather
Service and rain sounds, and you have a lyrical snapshot of the
rare moments California gets a good soaking.
El Jefe’s Amorphous Phormula is a brilliant piece of work
from a band that I hope is around for a very long time. It’s
changed my mind about a lot of things, and I can’t give a piece of
music higher praise than that.