| Cecil Otter - Rebel Yellow |
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| Written by Steve McPherson | |
| Wednesday, September 3, 2008 at 10:41 AM | |
 Cecil OtterRebel Yellow Doomtree Cecil Otter's MySpace page Cecil Otter's full-length debut went on sale on Tuesday, August 26, but somehow it seems oddly appropriate that I wouldn't get to listening to it until several days later, on the first truly cool morning since the summer began. On Rebel Yellow, Cecil's not here to get the party started, nor rain on your parade, but simply to kick your carefully piled leaves and stoke your wood-burning stove. As surely as the turning of the leaves, Cecil Otter is here to usher in the fall. If P.O.S. is the precocious and gifted visionary and Sims the workaholic overachiever of the Doomtree family, Cecil Otter is the guy who stays on the couch until the afternoon, but not out of laziness. He simply moves through the world differently; a self-described drifter, a loner, a rebel, a post-beatnik, a backroads wanderer. On his False Hopes, one was struck by his similarity to Atmosphere's Slug in his timbre and wry humor, but Rebel Yellow finds him more comfortable in his own skin, both as an emcee and a producer. Cecil produced every beat on the record, and laid end-to-end they show off his restless and nigh-apocalyptic sonic sensibility. For anyone who misses DJ Shadow's earlier, more organic sound, the music on Rebel Yellow is a treat, all booming, stuttering drums, delicately plucked acoustic guitars, keening choral voices, malevolent music boxes, and lush strings. The consistency is truly remarkable, especially in an era when most rap albums switch producers so often it's hard to get a sense of a unified vision. There are noelectro or disco touches here—just a sepia-tinted, crimson-streaked collage that's often a more evocative setting for Cecil's wordplay than the kind of pseudo-jazz backing that might be the default setting for his stories of lost nights and blind days. The majority of songs here are ones he's been performing for a while now, but again, taken as a whole they reinforce each other, and his fine and delicate way with words comes to the fore in the privacy of your car or headphones. As a rapper, Cecil seems to have little interest in the kind of lyrical dexterity prized by battle rappers; instead, he develops themes more slowly, but no less stunningly. "I'm just a lone wolf unchained with crooked fangs," he chants in the chorus to the title track. "I hear 'em calling your name (for crying out loud), I hear 'em calling your name (for crying out wolf), I hear 'em calling you out, I'm here I'm calling you out." It's an evocative and slowly shifting string of sense, and a good example of Cecil's methodical and precise way with language. Stream "Rebel Yellow" below: Language is the subject of the album's intro track, a manifesto called "The Poet is Rapist." In it, a poem "celebrating the realization that poems aren't going to change anything" is set to a slowly building track of Romantic intensity. The poem explains how the language of a poem fucks you, and the twist is that if it's hard at first, it's much easier the second time. It's certainly though-provoking, but Cecil Otter makes his bitter little pills easy enough of the first time, wrapped as they are in compelling beats and tied together by the simple weight of his production across an entire record. And yes, the frost is coming, but if summer's too hot and winter's too long, at least we get a little more fall than spring here in Minnesota, and Rebel Yellow is a fitting soundtrack for a season that's as much about harvest and reward as it is about death and change. |
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| Last Updated: Tuesday, September 9, 2008 at 02:20 PM |
