:: Track Listing

1. Growing Pains
2. Underground For
Dummies
3. Civil Obedience
4. Got Up This Morning
5. Good fashion
6. Clickety Clack
7. Midgets & Giants
8. Broccilude
9. High Step
10. Keep Moving
11. Waterline
12. Black Out On White
Night
13. Hell Of A Year
14. Call Me Francois
15. Hoofprints In The Sand
16. Going Back To Rehab

:: Record Review

Sage Francis

Human the Death Dance
(Epitaph; 2007)

Rating: 59%
Combined Rating: 55%


Flowers are blooming, butterflies are emerging from drab cocoons. Challenging mallet sports are unpacked from leather-bound picnic bags onto the lawn. Two-hour season finales mean business. The comforter needs to be taken to the drycleaners, the mothballs replaced: the time has come for another Sage Francis album.

And it's come to my attention that he will cum on my attention, an anecdote aping the artist's lyrics, if haphazardly, so sexually sad and a tad violent and elitist, rolling around in contradictory images and puns like a pig in whatever. So maybe he's not as angry -- but still "more honest than friendly" -- as he once was while on Anticon directing tirades against his guts, but not much has changed. Again he's going "personal," as if A Healthy Distrust (2004) was a detour, a full-on political album. It wasn't, too broad to not be about girls and too self-indulgent to not take time to describe the capillaries on the inner walls of his rectum. With Joey Beats he made Hope (2003), shallowly assumed to be a paean (of sorts) to hip-hop roots, and while expanding Francis's image as a morally conscious, hungry rapper, A Healthy Distrust didn't sound any larger, just doorknob grave.

Still, there he was, running away with Will Oldham and nice beats from Alias and Sixtoo and "statement" enough to warrant quotation marks. "Gunz Yo," they're phallic right? Slow down Francois; thanks for the "previously on" with "Underground For Dummies" this time around, but Human The Death Dance is still a Sage Francis primer, as is every Sage Francis LP, and what's more, it's your worst yet.

Which doesn't mean Sage has to leave the underground behind to stop taking baby steps. He makes it clear that won't be happening, his first words identity, all "And you'll know it was me by the trail of demos" before alluding loosely to a cross-section of his genre attempts: "Stalking, walking in my big black boots / I'm the DIY artist with thick grass roots." I think we get the point by now, the one about "indie" and "white" still being hip-hop buzzwords when "integrity" and "commoditization" are issues better suited for the climate where Atmosphere, Brother Ali, and Buck 65 make "emo" rap (And I know I've been told over a castellated Odd Nosdam beat, one that turns cement to Styrofoam, that shit's not emo.) But Sage's voice retains the eloquent grit of his most poignant rhymes as his delivery becomes substantially nimbler album to album; no doubt he's on his way to effortless or some ersatz modifier, the pop culture tropes and nostalgic send-ups all the more salient. The slicker he gets then, the less we can forgive a cut like "High Step," Edward Norton movie soundtrack or no, for backing ironically meat-headed, guffawing verbal noise with a guitar riff most likely chalked into the stately half-moon driveway of Rev Run's house. This is Ant at his most annoying. Same's with "Midgets & Giants," another chance for Sage to lash out at, um.poseurs? "8 Mile wasn't true, shithead / It was a promotional tool, but not for you, shithead / So let me tell you exactly what to do, shithead / Don't be a fool, stay in school / Shithead," he growls over a typically venereal if stuttered Alias arrangement, strangely bass heavy for a dude bragging about the purity of his voice, alone, shunning ole grandfather turntable. Those lyrics sound like they read: ugly.

Whatever dragging, alienating milieu he's tapping into -- that of bedroom/basement artist, that of bristling middleclass angst white rapper guy, of misanthropic lover made misanthropic by love -- he's only widening the bunghole, and bitter dregs are beginning to seep out. Do we really need a "Civil Obedience" ("Typically cyclical simple civil obedience"), a faux-Alias beat made by some Mr. Cooper with heart-plucking flute and that now predictable piano line clashing overtly with snappy but serious snare? Your answer might depend on how intuitively you've interpreted Sage's touchstones, how imbibed with his harrowing, fusty emo-isms you've become. Because by now, Sage Francis is emo; however populist you cut it, he's treading familiar paths, rhyming in familiar cadence, arguing with the asshole authority of an artist much too comfortable with his niche.

Similarly, the beat roster is filling formula, pulling attitude from the rapper's canon and dispersing what's expected. Buck 65 uses honky tonk and fiddle like a punchline? Neat. Jolie Holland sounds sultry and old? Cool. Sage had the foresight to record himself as a pre-pubescent rapping? That totally rules! Only Reanimator and creator-of-Crash-soundtrack Mark Isham lift a real pinky finger above the bland din. Isham's snippets "Water Line" and "Good Fashion," drumless, go ahead and give Sage Francis the melodramatic orchestra he's always had his eye on, and Reanimator's "Hoofprints In The Sand" wraps too loose a swagger around the self-righteous lyrics to deny the power of staving off an inevitable darkness. Then, when the trumpets split and a flute makes funk-lite sound older than Jesus, we're afforded a Sage Francis that seems vulnerable, assured, and amicable at once. The words are beautifully laden with religious tropes, a clear example of Sage's mighty lyrical grip: "But I'll never be hoodwinked, I'm mindful of the footprints / The shape of the hoof, the way the path in the wood splits / The author of the book, the origin of the crucifix / The waitress looking for tips in the place where the cook spits." He's still got it, sure; Human The Death Dance wasn't going to balk at any expectations.

All in all, Human The Death Dance is as good a place as any to start, and if you like this you'll like the rest of Sage Francis's music; you'll indubitably adore Personal Journals (2002). Then the time will come again -- perhaps next spring? -- when Paul Francis will dig too deeply, his fingernails scraping the bone. But maybe he'll exorcise his demons before then, offering up his heart and those things he loves most without having to staple them repeatedly to his sleeve. Eh. Fat chances come with fatter bombast. Dom Sinacola :: 18 May 2007 |