Album Review: I LAY DOWN MY LIFE FOR YOU by JPEGMAFIA

The shape of the shape of the shape of the shape Chaos merchant JPEGMAFIA toys with the tipping point of poor taste like it's his job (I mean, isn't it?). Rock rap that sidesteps corny (just)? Janky sample combos that, instead, compliment and coalesce? Blending industrial + jazz + punk + your mom without the hodgepodge distracting from legitimately excellent songcraft beneath? I Lay Down My Life For You is all of these things - a big ol' verbose splurge of everything and anything - yet far more coherent than the shitpost optics suggest it ought be. Again, it's all in the songcraft, in the way "don't rely on other men" (for example) distorts time and space to get from A to B: the dirty fuzz and staccato angularity of its first half morphing into colour and euphoria, busting out a crescendo of strings and soul and the rest of it.

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He only started rapping because his beats were too experimental for any other artists to take up. And instead of compromising his confrontational sound for commercial appeal, he worked up the experimental hip-hop ladder himself, becoming respected by internet hip-hop nerds and other left-field rappers alike. Every album, it seemed, was crazier than the last: on each, niche politics references, random disses towards random artists, and sound collage-esque samples butted up against each other in aggressive, strange mashups that are equally exhilarating and confusing.

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There's no one quite like JPEGMAFIA. A cultural disruptor, there's a punk-like defiance of the rules laced into his DNA. It's what drove Danny Brown link-up 'SCARING THE HOES', and it's what drove him - in spite of the controversy - to produce for Ye's 'VULTURES' project . He does what likes, in other words.

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