It’s become almost a cliche to think of hip-hop as a global lingua franca, but that doesn’t mean that the fact of it is any less remarkable. That an art form born amid poverty and disintegrating social cohesion in isolated pockets of a single eastern U.S. city in the 1970s has become a cultural force capable of linking disparate people all over the planet in the second quarter of the 21st century is, frankly, astonishing. And so is the way that the musical dimension of hip-hop has proved resilient and flexible enough to both resonate in different locations in recognisably ‘original’ forms, and to be able to accept and absorb and grow bigger through assimilating and referencing some very site-specific musical ingredients.
These thoughts are hardly new, but they’re inevitably among those that fight their way most forcefully to the front of the mind when first encountering Porcelain Shield, Paper Sword. A collaboration between producer-emcee Mary Sue and the five-piece, jazz-rooted band Clementi Sound Appreciation Club, the record sounds at once reassuringly familiar and yet particular, distinct, and intriguingly individual. If you were told it was the latest release from Mello Music Group you wouldn’t be at all surprised: the consistently excellent Tucson, Arizona, label’s catalogue includes North Carolina producer L’Orange’s melding of 1950s jazz samples and static-drenched recordings of pre-TV radio plays; the Detroit innovator Apollo Brown’s productions where groove dust and needle crunch are deliberately added or amplified; and two fantastic albums by Dueling Experts, comprising Chicago’s Verbal Kent, Ghanaian emcee Recognize Ali, and kung-fu-film-obsessed producer Lord Beatjitzu, who may or may not be from Mexico City. That Porcelain Shield, Paper Sword comes from Singapore, and is released by a Dutch label, seems at once confounding and yet makes complete sense.
A concept album about “a time-travelling oracle, struggling to find meaning in the modern world”, according to the listening notes on the project’s Bandcamp page, the record blends a range of unique and unusual elements into an engaging, compelling whole. It’s a record that manages to present its singular and distinctive constituent parts within an overarching structure that will feel familiar and welcoming to anyone whose tastes run from first-phase Wu-Tang to any band that’s made hip-hop using live instruments, from early Sugarhill to The Roots to Armand Hammer.
The record’s greatest strength is its ravenous approach to new ideas, and its ability to come up with a fresh thought before every possibility has been wrung out of the previous one. Nothing is allowed to overstay its welcome: only three of the sixteen tracks are longer than three minutes, and even the monstrous thrum of loping breakbeat and distressed guitar that turns ‘Oracle Bone Script’ into something approaching an obvious single is deployed for barely 60 seconds.
Ostensibly lo-fi and dirty, tracks like ‘The Well’ or ‘Crabs’ – which appears to be comprised of snippets of CSAC playing live, looped and manipulated by Mary Sue – reveal themselves as models of meticulous structure and compositional clarity. ‘Dragon Tail’ is like a series of overlapping introductions, Kenzo Nagari’s shimmering, floating guitar figures buzzing over repeated opening entreaties fizzing from Farizi Noorfauzi’s drum kit, the tension created by the song’s design preventing the teetering whole from collapsing.
Mary Sue’s vocal presence adds to the enigma, his baritone often cloaked by the music’s shadows or emerging from deep within the production’s backlit depths, bearing lyrics full of metaphor and allusion. “How you asking for a smile when you shouting for some silence?” he taunts towards the end of ‘Iron Butterfly’’s essay in dread portent; in ‘Thief and the Bell’ he maintains that “the only answer is to stop for a question”; during ‘Oracle Bone Script’ he comes as close as he gets to the stereotypical emcee brag with the nuanced claim that he’s “worth my weight in gold, dependent on economies”. Hip-hop’s cross-border exchange rate is always in flux, of course: but regardless of where the market price sits today, he is considerably undervaluing himself.
