Food for Animals: Belly

The debut album from Baltimore’s Food For Animals is so dangerous that it’s already banned from Payola play lists across the US. Vulture V and latest addition Hy spit surreal rhymes in acid waves, cracking minds open like egg shells, while the piercing, digitally hazy beats of Ricky Rabbit pummels your cerebral cortex and lower extremities into a fine paste. Yet, through the calamity of clicks, pops, skips, mauled samples, and supremely distorted bass, the essence of Belly lays in classic boom-bap, gun-clap, and blunted but high tempo dancehall beats. They just happened to be filtered and resampled into near oblivion. “Virgogo” even goes so far as to drop some hardcore techno on the scene with a pumping, crystal bassline and elevating vocal reconstruction, which drives the track. This is the utterly banal production of Lil’ Wayne and other such line toeing hip-pop commercials literally thrown in a blender. It’s like edIT made an album with Beans, and Kid606 remixed it. Understanding so well the history and present of hip-hop, yet shoving it willingly or otherwise into the future will see this record canonized along side Prefuse 73’s One World Extinguisher as one of the undeniably essential works of glitch-hop. The subgenre is obviously still quite viable.