El-P - Cancer For Cure

Former Company Flow man El-P’s third/fourth (my research is inconclusive – do people include El Producto’s jazz album High Water in his general back catalogue?) studio album Cancer For Cure comes five years after its predecessor, the much vaunted I’ll Sleep When You’re Dead.

In the intervening years, a few things have changed – for one, El-P put his label Def Jux “on hiatus”, removing the previous platform for such releases and necessitating the move to Fat Possum Records.  Some things, however, have not changed.

Cancer For Cure shows that El-P’s production chops are very much still intact and his world-view is no less dystopian.  The tracks on show here are just as claustrophobic and pervasive as those on I’ll Sleep When You’re Dead. For example, opener ‘Request Denied’ is near three minutes of 65daysofstatic-esque build up before El-P welcomes you back to his world, spitting his words out quick just in case someone is listening in.

Guest stars Danny Brown and Killer Mike – the latter fresh making his own El-P produced R.A.P. Music album – provide a new sound in the whirling miasma on ‘Oh Hail No’ and ‘Tougher Colder’ respectively, bringing you back to attention, as I occasionally found El-P’s raps getting lost in the noise, another layer in the sinister soundscape.

On ‘The Jig Is Up’ El-P proclaims; “I wouldn’t want to be a part of any club that would have me”.  It is possible that this attitude of isolation is what is making El-P stand creatively still – Cancer For Cure is really very good, it will likely get better over the years as did I’ll Sleep When You’re Dead; but that is kind of my point – I find it all too similar, like I’ll Sleep When You’re Dead Pt II.  No bad thing; and I suppose “Why change a winning formula?” applies, but I guess I expected El-P to change it up a little.