Don’t Clip that Unibrow, Friend

Deep bass lines, break beats, catchy hooks and a recognizable melody are usual components of a hip hop record, but on CLPPNG by the trio clipping, these parts have been traded for minimalistic rhythms and odd clusters of noise. Rapper Daveed Diggs and producers Jonathan Snipes and William Hutson have created an album without the normal bells and whistles. Instead the bells resemble industrial alarms and the whistles are more like grinding gears. These three have an orchestra of misfit toys at their disposal, and by God, they compose some interesting symphonies.

“Intro” assaults your ear drums with uncomfortable white noise while Diggs leaves you feeling even more disoriented with his Superman-speed verbal delivery. “Work Work” is a hybrid of modern radio hip hop and clipping’s own version of it. The chorus sounds like any average club song, but everything else is anything but the norm. “Tonight” featuring Gangsta Boo is another song that has a more contemporary feel, but even then there’s something that seems foreign.

“Get Up” is based on one of the most annoying sounds ever known to the human race: an alarm clock buzzer. But once Diggs is on the mic this loathed sound becomes the only logical choice for the composition. Mariel Jacoda supplies the chorus and adds a nice, safe place within this cacophonic hurricane.

Like an attractive person with an unibrow, some things are just distracting and hard to overlook. Over time, though, you begin to not even notice the unibrow, and in fact if it was gone this person’s face would seem weird and unfamiliar. CLPPNG has an unibrow that is thick and at times overpowers the other characteristics of the face, but without its unforgiving nonconformity this album would just blend in with all the other perfectly manicured faces, not deserving of a second glance.