Death Grips — Exmilitary Album Review
The closest you’ll get to finding music that sounds illegal.
“What am I, gonna run around and act like I’m some teenybopper somewhere, for somebody else’s money? I make the money, man, I roll the nickels, the game is mine!” — Charles Manson — MC Ride
In some ways, it feels like this is an album that we shouldn’t be listening to. It feels wrong. I feel comfortable saying that this album has inspired me to challenge my own tastes and musical boundaries.
Death Grips is a genre-pushing group in every sense of the phrase. While virtually impossible to assign a single genre to, the group has long been characterized as an “experimental hip-hop” group. While on balance this is true, this label ignores the other genres and sounds that the group regularly explores on this album and in subsequent works. They frequently dabble in the electronic, hardcore punk, cyberpunk, noise rock, industrial hip-hop, and spoken word genres. Some tracks — such as Culture Shock — offer a preview of the futuristic, cyberpunk, and electronic sounds that the group would come to embrace in future albums.
It’s impossible to describe Death Grips to friends and family. When I do try, I often resort to explaining that listening to the group is the auditory equivalent of being high on every prohibited substance available. And perhaps that’s the most admirable quality of the album. After all, I have long maintained that the hallmark of high quality art (e.g., visual art, music, film) is its ability to elicit an emotional response from the listener. The substance of the response (e.g., sadness, joy, anger, fear, euphoria) is largely irrelevant. There are many albums that are great because they make the listener feel happy, understood, or listened to. By contrast, Exmilitary is great because it completely overwhelms you. The result is extremely visceral, intense, and borderline anxiety-inducing.
Perhaps Nate Patrin of Pitchfork described the album best as “a bludgeoning slab of hostility” that “avoids being an overbearing mess”. At the same time, however, the album provides considerable variety in its brutality: the aggression of Takyon (Death Yon) makes the listener feel like they’re being beaten to death with a lead pipe, while Culture Shock is electronic, extremely catchy, and glitchy. On Klink, the guitar melody coupled with Ride’s anguished yelps are demented and urgent.
Released in 2011, Exmilitary spans 13 tracks across 44 minutes. To date, it is one of the only albums I’ve ever listened to that has blown my mind on first listen. The combination of genres, sounds, themes, and samples is completely original (seriously, a Bowie sample on an industrial hip-hop record?). While embracing a rawer, more animalistic sound compared to the group’s later works, Exmilitary offers a glimpe into the sounds that characterized the group’s future albums. While many of the tracks here lean more into the experimental/industrial hip-hop genre, tracks like Lord of the Game and Culture Shock are glitchier, more electronic, and less accessible. These are themes that the group would adopt more comprehensively on later LPs like The Money Store, Government Plates, and The Powers That B.
Those looking to push their musical boundaries are encouraged to check this album out. Groups like Death Grips show us that music can be so much more than we think it can be.
