By TJ Love
Victor is an EP offering from Toronto-based longtime collaborators electronica duo ZEDS DEAD and emcee Omar Linx. Production wise, ZEDS DEAD’s sound is loosely possessed of the Hip-Hop aesthetic but for the most part it’s a departure from their norm.Victor contains elements of drum and bass, jungle, down tempo, and other electronica that defies description. In a lot of ways it’s similar in spirit to the work of jazz great Charlie Mingus; not immediately accessible to the typical cat but upon a more thorough listen one begins to appreciate how seemingly discordant parts of the compositions are essential to what makes them work as a whole.
The seven track project starts off with the standout track “No Prayers.”. It features a vocalist that sounds eerily like Bjork to complement a morose, melancholy, and compelling soundtrack heavy with cinematic touches along with verses by Omar Linx detailing his personal dystopia. “You and I” is a cut in the same vein with more haunting vocals by Bjork’s a-alike. Omar Linx takes the occasion as an opportunity to wax bitterly poetic about the vagaries of loves lost.
“Jackie Boy 2.0” is another beautifully depressing song that starts out with some initially pensive guitars and pianos until it flips into some hardcore electronica with an array of blips and bleeps over 808 bass kicks compressed through a vocoder effect. In the midst of all this craziness Omar Linx, who by this point in the project has the life of a loser, draws allegory to his relationship with the bottle and his relationship with his significant other.
“Coffee Break” is the only decent track that doesn’t feature the aforementioned Bjork clone. While it is definitely on some other ish, it contains a conventional sped up soul sample to keep things fully tethered to planet Earth while Linx spits a double time cadence with lyrics dedicated to optimism and the better things.
Kissy Sellout, another heavy hitter among the electronica, DJ set has called ZEDS DEAD “the future of genre-flipping genius.” If there’s one aspect that is clear from this project it is this: just because something sounds cool doesn’t mean that automatically throwing some rhymes over it is an improvement. To put it simply, Omar Linx’s verses are a little superfluous to the whole project. While their collaborative effort is commendable, the more Hip -Hop-centric listener will be woefully underwhelmed by Victor as a whole. All this mixing and matching of genres always looks cool on paper, but the he results are hit or miss. And in this case, ZEDS DEAD and Omar Linx are decidedly off the mark.
When people throw terms around like “futuristic” and “genre bending” it’s usually a sign to head for the hills as either both or at least one of two disparate aspects of these mash ups is not fully realized. For those accustomed to the elite level lyricism apparent in El-P’s post-apocalyptic b-boy style working with artists such as Aesop Rock or Cannibal Ox on his Definitive Jux boutique label or the Juggaknots crew’s similar Bladerunner boom bap, Omar Linx doesn’t measure up. He’s a far cry from the Breeze Brewins, C-Rayz Wallz, and Vast Aires of the world. If producers of projects like Victor endeavor to take the listener on a different type of journey aurally, the emcees should be up to the task of composing rhymes as adventurous as the tracks they are rhyming over.
2.75 Out of 5
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