by Jordan Michael (@jordwhyjames)
Armand Hammer gets the “prog-hop” genre tag on Bandcamp for appropriate reasoning. Progressive hip-hop is rap music that transforms the genre through stylistic experimentation. It pushes innovation in all directions, carving its own niche that eventually becomes easily recognizable despite the differences in instrumentation from one release to the next. Now on their sixth album as Armand Hammer, billy woods and ELUCID keep their signature menacing taboo rolling, somehow hitting higher dynamic levels than previously accomplished.
We Buy Diabetic Test Strips is an intense listen at 53 minutes with psychedelic rewards. Most of the production puts the listener into a daze—instrumental transitions jump to and fro alongside snippets of telephone calls. If you’re dialed into the album enough, you may wonder how soon the apocalypse is arriving. Of course, this is nothing new for ELUCID and woods, who each have a deep catalog of ominous rap music. At this point, it is an expectation for Armand Hammer to be whimsically weird. This time for their Fat Possum Records debut (their first album not officially released by woods’ Backwoodz Studioz), they’ve included more production partners than ever.
The mix of producers—JPEGMAFIA, Child Actor, Preservation, DJ Haram, August Fanon, El-P, Steel Tipped Dove, Kenny Segal, Willie Green, Black Noi$e, and Sebb Bash—makes for a spectacle. We Buy Diabetic Test Strips varies from To Pimp A Butterfly introspection bubbles, dance beats, dark energy, flute, chaos, sexy chill, and an overall sense that you’re on a bizarre trip. As fathers in their 40’s living in New York City, woods and ELUCID have experienced enough strangeness to fill whatever context they need for their raps. They are fast rappers; if you’re not paying attention, you might miss the point. ELUCID told the New York Times that he and woods take the reckless spirit of Ol’ Dirty Bastard, that kind of energy. To be familiar with Armand Hammer means being familiar with the unfamiliar.
Armand Hammer and the rest of the Backwoodz Studioz crew have the dynamic power that once belonged to The Wu-Tang Clan or Odd Future Wolf Gang Kill Them All. Armand Hammer is more progressive than those other groups, and certainly more weird. This is not a negative connotation; we like weird music. We like to contemplate, sit, and listen closely, no distractions. No doubt, woods and ELUCID are deep thinkers, grandiose individuals. We connect through their potent introspection and lavish beats. WBDTS is not Armand Hammer’s greatest album, but they don’t care about outdoing themselves, they care about making a difference in culture, saying shit that may not have been said previously in the rap game.
We see it in the track names, “Woke Up and Asked Siri How I’m Gonna Die,” “The Flexible Unreliability of Time & Money,” “I Keep A Mirror In My Pocket,” “Trauma Mic,” “Niggardly,” “Supermooned,” and “The Key Is Under the Mat.” We see/hear it in their profound raps:,“Lion wakes up in the morning knowing to hunt a gazelle;” “you don’t work, you don’t eat;” “mirror, mirror, get out of my face/you ask me to remove my shoes when your floors ain’t clean;” “missionary because I know god sees us;” “my heart pump ketamine/voodoo the cause of death; “C.I.A. Scams, revolutionary plans;” and “break up with me, I’m a G, I stay friends with your mother.”
Some of Armand Hammer’s beats stray far from hip-hop (“When It Doesn’t Start With A Kiss,” “Ya’ll can’t Stand Right Here,” “Empire BLVD,” and “Supermooned”), but it is a testament to how talented ELUCID and billy woods are as rappers. ELUCID did two features on woods’ 2012 album, History Will Absolve Me, forming a mutual admiration that has now blossomed into some really far out stuff. They’re inspired by NYC’s bizarre atmosphere, and wealth disparity as a whole. These dudes are somewhere else; they have electric currents in their teeth. They’re flying with no pilots, their security deposit is not coming back, and they’re somehow getting darker.