Since I publicly mourned the fact that Korean-American rapper Cool Calm Pete wasn’t putting out any more records, he’s done the woozy, melodic single “These Daze“, collabs with Heems and Cheshire rapper Lee Scott, re-released 2005’s mini-masterpiece Lost with some outtakes and, most improbable of all, put out a second full album.
My delay in writing about demolition, which was released in late July, has largely been down to not quite knowing what to make of it. My initial response was that it sounded a little unfinished, a little tossed off, especially given the wait we had to endure for it. I’ve now come to the conclusion that the qualities that gave me that impression are the very things that make it work. It is, in its way, as effective an evocation of what it is to be a certain kind of person living through certain times as my beloved Lost was two decades earlier.
The album opens with “Hertz”, a two minute soundscape in which snatches of TV, ads and audience sounds, echoing room tone, little hiccuping sobs and stabs of bass about in a dreamy sonic expanse like detritus bobbing in a tide. From here the songs continue to be restless, oneiric and short — there are 16 tracks over the 42 minutes runtime, most of them featuring more than one distinct musical sections. When he does rap, Pete’s 2025 flow is such a drawling, somnambulant baritone that it makes his early work sound like Twista on helium. This combines to fill the album with temporal disjunctures — on tracks like “Hertz” or “Atlantis”, time will slow and dilate. Elsewhere, there will be sudden shifts from one idea and set of tones to another.
Take the sampled dialogue that echoes on ‘Now?!’:
‘Now. You’re looking at now, sir. Everything that happens now, is happening now.’
‘What happened to then?’
‘We passed then.’
‘When?’
‘Just now. We’re at now now.’
This is from Mel Brooks ’80s Star Wars spoof Spaceballs, but in these surrounds it’s rendered as eerie as Sapphire and Steel‘s ‘This place is nowhere, and it’s forever’ conclusion.
If demolition‘s haunted qualities — the slowed, heavy keys and faintly discordant waves of synth — have you hankering for Pete’s sweeter, more soulful palette, don’t despair: “These Days” is in there, and we close on the bittersweet yet quietly triumphant “Hats and Glasses”.
And best of all is “Prologue”. Pete raps over one of his best ever beats, showcasing that great knack of his for uncovering treasure/trash beauty. In this case strings sounding like the love theme from a Kung Fu movie, complete with angelic vocables and a trembling violin line. The lyrics, with typical shorthand and allusion, touch on his career and long absence before the album’s most explicit and affecting moment of emotion. At 2.35 he dedicates the track to “the hopes and dreams gone astray” then breaks into a high, frail singing voice: “Ironic, how life just gets in the way”. He concludes on a note of fatalism:
When it’s all said and done/Tupac, Biggie and Pun/Fast food or guns, we all just …
And then he’s interrupted by a series of warped string stabs, and it’s off to the next idea.
All in all, demolition vividly evokes a feeling that became discernible to most during the recent lockdown years, but predates it, and has lingered long after. With the strange slow/fast time of the music, and Pete’s voice frequently distant in the mix, it has a sense of the insularity and unreality of our time, of its relentless streams of information, its constant light and noise. Not all of it bad, much of it genuinely pleasurable, but all of it both insubstantial and inescapable.
*I’ve included a Spotify link so you have the option to quickly listen, but of course, fuck Spotify and everyone should buy a digital copy on bandcamp. I’ll update the links if a physical copy becomes an option.
Dancing to Architecture 