ShrapKnel – Lincoln Continental Breakfast/Saisir Le Feu/Armature
ShrapKnel overwhelm by design. The richly detailed and highly hazardous world that Curly Castro and PremRock spin from the ether is overloaded with fast-moving images and stream-of-consciousness observations, recognizable yet not always decipherable, a tightly layered collage that forms a stunningly unsettling whole. As emcees, they provide a perfectly tense counterbalance for one another, Curly animated and unpredictable while PremRock maintains a cooler disposition, engaging in a back-and-forth that’s always thrilling even at their most mind-boggling, and unexpectedly fun even when slipping through the darkest of alleys. Yet for all of ShrapKnel’s lyrical labyrinths, they’ve always been as much about sound as imagery, whether it’s Elucid’s noise-laden production on their debut album or Controller 7 lending an eerie chill their apocalyptic visions on last year’s Nobody Planning to Leave.
The duo’s new three-album series, collectively titled the Triple Steel Beam Collection, raises the stakes in every possible dimension, pairing the emcees’ knotty narratives with three different producers, each one showcasing a different aspect of ShrapKnel’s mutifaceted rap via their respective, eclectic sonic palettes. An hour and a half of mesmerizing verbal gymnastics and darkly disorienting sonic creations, the trio of albums raises the bar for a pair of emcees—and their collaborators—whose nonlinear transdimensional travels already proved dizzying.
The first of the three albums to be released, Lincoln Continental Breakfast finds Detroit producer and Bruiser Brigade alum Raphy behind the boards, providing cinematic backdrops with a vintage crackle behind the duo’s dazzling delivery. It’s a natural fit; much like Curly Castro and PremRock themselves, Raphy deftly threads a needle between playful and menacing, transitioning from a cheeky sample of a Lincoln commercial into the blazing, dystopian boom-bap scorcher “Impossible Windows.”
The 26-minute album (mini-album? one-third album?) moves at a relentless clip from there, Prem and Castro sounding as if they barely need a moment to catch a breath on the two-minute noir groove of “Freemason Cazals” or twisting a Dr. Dre hook sideways on the swampy funk of “Trigger Warning.” Keeping up with the two emcees proves as challenging as it is rewarding through this sub-half-hour sprint, each track seemingly packing several songs’ worth of ideas in just two minutes, so when things slow down just a little, like on “Blade Opera,” the result feels unusually epic.
Saisir Le Feu takes a more abstract turn, thanks in large part to the space-age production of Mike Ladd, hip-hop veteran and dystopian visionary of the Y2K era underground rap class. There’s an immediate feeling of disorientation in the stark, cosmic drift of “Hoplophobia,” its throbbing synth bassline an unsettling beacon in its backdrop. But in contrast to Raphy’s beats, there’s more space here, offering more room for the two emcees to flex their wordplay, like this eye-popping sequence from PremRock: “La-la-la-la-la-la-lullabies for the tongue tied/I spy blood on sunrise/arsenal for the gun shy/Unsheath the blade by the bedside/I sleep with it sometimes.”
Saisir Le Feu (translation: “seize the fire”) kicks into higher gear in its second half, its landing party touching down to terra firma and breaking out a few bottles of the good stuff. Curly Castro free-associates at superhuman speeds against classic rock guitar licks in the spectacular “Mercure,” the duo get submerged in heady waves of Rhodes keys in the mesmerizing “Bitter Root,” and on “Alphabet Pho,” they pass the mic to Anticon/cLOUDDEAD legend doseone, whose villainous rasp steals the show with a goblin’s-growl incantation set against one of his dawn-of-the-21st-century peer’s darkly abstract productions: “Pronounced, paramount/More predators/Plethora/Et cetera/seven letter/a massacre/infinite/mixed with classical instrument/mastered with an intimate notion of the molten pit.”
The final piece of the triptych is Armature, which features production from prolific Richmond beatmaker Ohbliv, and it veers in its own direction, neither tense and urgent nor ominous and futuristic. Rather, Ohbliv takes the duo down a more psychedelic and surrealistic path, setting their loopy narratives against twinkling avant-garde jazz beds, like the swirl of atonal flute and lush vibraphone in opening track “Hard Ticket History,” or the blurry late-night horns winding up beneath Curly Castro’s bootlegging antics in “Pooh Rich”: “long story short, we were slingin’em tapes/’til the fuzz caught wind, blew it up in our face.“
Not that these songs don’t hit just as hard; Curly nods to a “guitar sound like wolverine scratches” amid the fluttering riff loops on “Flip Murray” that sound more like a drunk bumblebee. There’s a sultry late-night groove in “Take It KiD” underscoring PremRock’s acrobatic internal rhymes (“let the ink sink in, and to think, it was only sink or swim“), a soulful and sultry summer-night groove on “Hopeless ‘Notic,” and the guitars actually sound like wolverine scratches in the fight scene of a closer “Bare Knuckle Blade Party,” a suitably chaotic wallpaper beneath PremRock delivering a solid minute of breathless turns of phrase (“You and I, we both share the same hobby/Both decorate our space with stained papier-mâché and act betrayed when there’s decay at the base of the brain,” “The minute hand ticks, man, something like quicksand/magician at the Skinwalker Ranch/said it’s all in the wrists“).
The nature of double albums, let alone triples, would suggest that bloat and indulgence simply come with the territory, and most of the time that’s true. But Lincoln Continental Breakfast, Saisir Le Feu and Armature nimbly elude such traps by virtue of being three lean, self-contained individual albums that stand on their own even while comprising a greater whole. And as such, ShrapKnel take one half-hour each to speedrun through boom with extra bap, cosmic soothsaying and psychedelic dissociation. It’s achievement enough that they went this big; it’s all the more astonishing that it goes this hard.
Label: Fused Arrow
Year: 2025
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