CD Review: Prefuse 73 - Security Screenings

Scott Herren, the producer extraordinaire behind the Prefuse 73 alias, says that Security Screenings is “based on reactions to certain things that happened to me during the past year or so”. By the sound of this album, he had a much more exciting 2005 than many of us.

Way before that though, since 1997, he’s dabbled in electronica, as well as the more rap-based sound of last year’s Surrounded By Silence. As you’d expect of a man that simultaneously releases records under at least five different pseudonyms, his latest work is anything but straightforward. An amalgam of both his previous directions, Security Screenings can only be described as “post hip-hop”: mellow glitchy beats on one side of the coin, with sampled MCs chopped up beyond recognition on the other.

Whether such a coin is worth much, however, is a different matter. The cut-and-paste acrobatics are sometimes too clever for their own good, with opening montage ‘”The Letter P” verging on unlistenable stop-startiness. When it doesn’t sound like a scratched DJ Shadow CD though, there are some great moments to be had. Album highlight “Creating Cyclical Headaches”, a joint composition with Four Tet, is all the better for not veering from the tried and tested “folktronica” sound popularised by the collaborator’s own Rounds. It’s certain proof of the old adage “less is more” that when Prefuse chooses a single idea and runs with it, he’s far more successful then when he cooks up a musical bubble-and-squeak.

You can’t blame a guy for trying something different though, and over the course of this disc’s forty minutes, Prefuse’s sonic experimentation pays off. The resulting album is one of the most interesting you’ll hear this year. Not one of the best, mind – just one of the ones that’s most likely to make you sit up and say, “what the hell was that?” But when he can turn that wow-factor from studio doodles into full-blown songs, Scott Herren will really be onto something.

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Article Author: Jonathan Deamer

Jonathan Deamer writes music reviews and articles like this on his blog, along with all sorts of other interesting bits and pieces on his tumblelog.

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