Pitchfork

If a pterodactyl flies by my window, and I hear it make a screeching noise like "AAAHK! WAAHK!", does that make me an expert on dinosaurs? No, it does not. If you get members of Antipop Consortium and Anticon to rap on your album, does that change the fact that you've just released what amounts to a stale, heavy-handed trance record? No, it does not. Fortunately, there are enough pterodactyls flying around going "AAAHK! WAAHK!" on DJ Krush's seventh full-length, The Message at the Depth, that if all else fails (and it does), he can at least pretend that this album was 65 million years before its time.

It reminds you of.
You know. Those raves you went to.
In, like, the 90s.
(haiku)

Krush's beats are just unbelievably stale here, but that's not this record's only problem (even if it is its most immediate). It's the studied melodrama with which he introduces every echoing layer of synth debris at the exact correct, premeditated machination of a tom trill. And the songs don't go anywhere. He sounds like he's either bored and cranking this shit out or trying to prove how spooky he is. For his sixth album in a row.

Fractals. So profound!
The beats. So heavy-hitting!
Just one, wing, flapping.

DJ Krush is hellbent on illustrating his own interpretation of HELL: a war-torn, apocalyptic world based on history and current events that also falls in line with the premise of many a Manga. Good. Evil. Their timeless, endless battle. But the biggest flaw here is that there's just no good to drive home The Message at the Depth's evil. This record relies on the sorriest aural metaphors, the saddest cliches of late-90s electronica: Krush even employs a recurring theme of a black hole to illustrate war and destruction. It seethes and sucks beneath Anticon's anti-G.W. rants, the cocky hair-flipping diva crooning about Hiroshima on "Alephevo (Truthspeaking)", and "What About Tomorrow", this album's triumphant look towards the future. It's just so fuckin' hammy! He tries so hard, but just Beats! You! Over! The! Head! This stuff is way too dense, with no respite and no real crescendo. Remember, there ain't no hell without a heaven, no yin without a yang. There ain't no midlife-crisis sax solo straight out of a Bravo channel commercial on "But the World Moves One" without a chick listening to it on her headphones 3,000 miles away and rolling her eyes.

YO. CAN YOU FEEL IT?
DJ Krush is in the vortex.
So medium-rare.

The one moment of release on Message comes in the second half of "Song for John Walker", a track smoothed out with undeniably great lyrics: "He wanted Hammer pants, he joined the Taliban," spits Doseone, in a surprisingly abrasive and uncharacteristically agitated tone. "He sought an absolute truth, the alfa clech/ But he got the omega and bucked/ How many more humans will wear gun spit in their guts?" The relief comes when Anticon's Pedestrian, Sole, Why?, Alias, Passage and Dose spiral into their signature, drugged-out spoken-harmony-- a rare placement of feather lightness on a record even Antipop Consortium's stellar diction can't save. But it lasts only a second, a pinhole of supernova in a vast universe anchored by Krush's murderous concrete-block beats.