Themselves: CrownsDown

By: Dennis Cook

This is like an inoculation against crap hip-hop, something percolated on a hot plate in a tiny room festooned with the flotsam & jetsam of the genre’s decades long gestation. As beat boxes and turntables are stroked into service, Themselves crunch down on the cracked plastic cases of EPMD and X-Clan cassettes, the thick ooze of them creeping into the soles of their feet, powering up their blood with the same hungry drive for originality and head-nodding rightness. One should always use the word “masterpiece” sparingly and with real caution, but when one hops up to greet you there’s no denying it.

CrownsDown (released November 3 on Anticon) slams into your cerebellum like a Stephen Hawking/Che Guevara cocktail, swiftly loosening chakras and calcified thinking. Always thought “underground hip-hop” had no hump in the trunk? Lie, and you’ll know it as “Back II Burn” or “Skinning The Drum” whips the honky outta your limbs as Doseone spits and growls in new millennial semaphore over an amphetamine-ized, Jay-Z worthy bounce. And CrownsDown just keeps it coming, grasping bits from hip-hop’s every era and subset and twisting them MacGyver style into wonderful, impossible new tools. The speed and overarching acumen of Dose and Jel here is simply breathtaking. There’s just no way to digest it all quickly, and perhaps it can never be fully known. But, each visit is like the first time with a fantastic new lover – sensual, surprising, and just drippin’ hormones and hangin’ participles.

These boys are brilliant in Subtle – perhaps THE under-sung band of the 2000s – but Themselves, and this release in particular, presents a harder, more direct bent. Where Subtle, befitting their name, seduces and beguiles with a mixture of flurry and hang-back charm, Themselves jumps into your lap and sticks a wet finger into your ontological bellybutton. Where many other groups consciously operating outside of mainstream hip-hop’s facile, predictable parameters choose obfuscation and dreamy distance, Themselves have chosen direct, furious engagement on CrownsDown. They are taking on the establishment AND the backpack wearing shadow dwellers. They are claiming the birthright of ALL of hip-hop’s children, where primo shit talking AND Noam Chomsky level discourse can canoodle joyfully upon fractured blips AND sweaty boom-bap. CrownsDown reinvigorates the artistic promise of hip-hop, joining the small pantheon of the genre’s truly essential albums, proudly rubbing shoulders with the likes of Organized Konfusion’s Stress: The Extinction Agenda, Buck 65’s Vertex, Freestyle Fellowship’s To Whom It May Concern… and Wu-Tang’s Enter The Wu-Tang (36 Chambers).

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