Underground producer Xrin Arms has put out a lot of material in the last few years, and most of it is accessible for free on one website or another (check out grindcore karaoke if you're interested). If you've never heard Xrin Arms (pronounced "Urine Arms") aka Anthony Vincent, his beats are typically grimy, off-kilter and have a distinct hip-hop vibe to them. When I first heard him, Xrin Arms was a digital grindcore and noise musician who I couldn't really dig. That's changed a bit with his newer material. I think he's beginning to find his niche as a musician even though his beats haven't really caught on within circles of popular "alternative" hip-hop, for a number of reasons.
Destructo Farm is a psychedelic, instrumental hip-hop album. The beats are pretty catchy, even when contrasted with the surreal melodies, guitars, organs and electronic samples that they're played over. The overall vibe of Destructo Farm is one of psychedelic motion sickness, thanks to the weirdly unbalanced nature of Xrin Arms' beats and the phaser-like effect used on many of the album's bizarre melodies. Listening to this makes me feel like I'm trying to keep my feet during a drunken night on some haunted party cruiser. The problem with this feeling is that it gets nauseating pretty quickly. After 38 minutes of the same exact vibe from song to song, the motion sickness starts to take hold and I find myself searching for some other album to give me back my sense of balance
The other factor playing into this feeling of motion sickness is that once Xrin Arms drops a beat in a song, he pretty much sticks to it throughout it's entirety. These songs don't change up much at all, even though they do kind of build (which keeps them from sounding totally monotonous) they don't seem to go anywhere. And while the songs aren't monotonous per se, they are all pretty forgettable due to the fact that they have the exact same atmosphere. The only songs that stood out to me were Worm Galaxy because it seemed to be the one song that really perfected the whole motion sickness vibe, Roadblock Tony + The Never Ending Binge because of its funky guitar and bass rhythm, and The Lowest Profile for its swinging piano sample. But if your whole album can be summed up by a few songs, what's the point in listening to the entire thing?
Destructo Farm plays around with some interesting ideas, but I wish that the songs would go places and get a bit adventurous rather than playing it safe with really simple beats.
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