Album review: El-P's 'Cancer 4 Cure' - latimes.com

Throughout the head trip of an album that is ?Cancer 4 Cure,? surveillance drones buzz Brooklyn, handwritten notes are left on fallen soldiers and messages of serenity are pierced with choppy beats that morph into gunfire. Is this a current-events record or a snapshot of one?s paranoia? Ace producer and longtime champion of underground hip-hop El-P walks a fine line on ?Cancer 4 Cure,? crafting aggression with militaristic precision.

The first solo album in five years from El-P (real name: Jaime Meline), the 12 tracks here are overflowing with pent-up confusion. The characters he inhabits are best confined to our nightmares, more frightening than any horror film because they?re regular folks driven bad.

A tapped cymbal hovers like a vulture on ?For My Upstairs Neighbor (Mums the Word),? where keyboard upon keyboard creates a black hole swirl as an unlikely killer stays stone-faced during a police interrogation. He raps, ?I hate you for making me make a man bleed? on ?Tougher Colder Killer,? in which an army vet is a prisoner of his own mind.

The spinning synths of ?Works Every Time? paint the landscape like lights from a prison watchtower, electronics bubbling like little calls for help. Yet even though he?s offered a ?fresh start on a new world,? El-P still finds himself homesick. Maybe it?s simply a case of Stockholm syndrome, but it?s no small feat that the mixed-up, war-torn world of haves and have-nots presented here is as inviting as it is.

El-P
?Cancer 4 Cure??
Fat Possum
Four stars (Out of four)

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