“When I blow up, I’m gonna go nuts,” Quentin Branch declares on “Stanley Kubrick,” a track from Angry Blackmen’s The Legend of ABM. The Chicago-based experimental hip-hop duo’s beats are distorted and dissonant, with traces of industrial-rock influence paired with a punk-tinged aggression. This contrast in sounds is mirrored by their vocal styles: Brian Warren offers a melodic touch, rapping in a quick sing-song manner with few pauses, while Branch leans toward more straightforward shouting.
Angry Blackmen’s dedication to this mode of uneasy listening is uncompromising throughout. The album’s production is enveloping, with sharp changes of dynamics and sustained, ominous electronics. “FNA” opens with blown-out 808s, while “Dead Men Tell No Lies” ends on the repeated title phrase, filtered so it barely even sounds like a human voice.
The Legend of ABM finds Branch and Warren examining their professional ambition on tracks like “Grind.” Lyrics such as “Money on my mind when I rhyme” are less a flex than a distillation of the distant dream of making a living as a rapper. On “Sabotage,” Branch frankly admits that “underground rapping isn’t paying for my medical,” and guest SKECH185 sums up mainstream hip-hop as “subgenres of Black trauma boxing each other over lord of the pit” on “Outsiders.”
Elsewhere, “Magnum Opus” takes an even more personal tack, looking back on the rappers’ childhoods in Chicago, where Warren recalls the devastation caused by drugs and violence: “Age 11, I’m at work cleaning barber stations in the hood where the bullets rain over faces.” Branch muses about his “alcoholic addiction” on “Suicidal Tendencies,” while the pair call out critics who expect them to pander to the white gaze on “Dead Men Tell No Lies.” Like the beats themselves, then, the songs on The Legend of ABM are bracingly blunt.
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