October 28, 2016

Warp Records

1xLP

Danny Brown's fourth album takes its title from the opening track on Joy Division's Closer, which in turn borrowed the title from the J.G. Ballard collection of condensed novels. Ballard's Atrocity Exhibition was a perverse, splintered peak into an already fractured mind, and a damning critique of America in the wake of the JFK assassination. Brown's Atrocity Exhibition isn't far off from it's source material, with him tracing a similarly kaleidoscopic descent into madness. Brown's greatest weapons (his cartoonish squawk, his gallows humour, his eclecticism) are at their sharpest, even while his mind is blunted with mania and several substances mere mortals wouldn't dare touch. There are few examples or rapping more exemplary than All-Star posse cut "Really Doe." Rarely has anyone sounded as vengeful on wax as Brown does on "Hell For It." Never has insanity been articulated better than "Ain't It Funny." Like it's titular predecessors, Brown's Atrocity Exhibition is an ugly masterpiece of post-modern rap, and the most accomplished work in a catalogue full of them.