By It’s our Bandcamp Picks of the Week, featuring Cise Greeny’s colorful, stream-of-consciousness rap record MASTER SWORD and SUSS’s sweeping ambient country album BIRDS & BEASTS!
Cise Greeny – MASTER SWORD
Genre: Art Rap
Favorite Tracks: “GERUDO’S FORTRESS,” “HEART CONTAINER,” “PRETTY SOLID GROOVE”
Cise Greeny is one busy nerd.
Part of a burgeoning class of earnest New York rappers like Fatboi Sharif, Phiik, Lungs, and S!LENCE, the Queens’ artist has been nothing if not prolific over the last few years. The most recent of nearly four albums released in a year-ish period, MASTER SWORD is a dizzying stream of consciousness that feels as though you’re sitting next to Greeny playing OCARINA OF TIME in real time, a micro slice-of-life listen filled with production and melodies cribbing from various corners of the Zelda universe. From track titles like “SHEIK MEETING / DESTINY TEMPLE” and “TRI-FORCE” to various in-game sound effects coloring each beat, the album vulnerably ends up exploring where our own fandoms begin and end within ourselves; Greeny’s stories on MASTER SWORD—and in turn, his raps writ large—are inexplicably linked to The Legend of Zelda, but that’s true for all of us and the pop culture we hold dear, and the way we think about our own stories over time.
Over squeaky, topsy-turvy instrumentals he abstractly waxes poetic about Jackson Heights and the Limewire days and then, ultimately, about growing up—centering himself as the main character on a hero’s journey that is still unfolding but began in the days of playing as Link on the N64. As he raps in the closer “PHANTASMA (OUTRO), “Ain’t no ifs ands or maybes / The nucleus was me / Wasn’t nothing above or underneath.” So often, Greeny is rapping from the perspective of having reawoken, and below Greeny’s sign-off on the album on Bandcamp, it reads “7 YEARS LATER…,” an OCARINA OF TIME reference to Link pulling the Master Sword in the Temple of Time only to find himself older in a Hyrule that is falling apart. With both this album and his previous work (especially the delightfully dense and equally meticulous METAL HEAD), Cise Greeny is cleverly finding ways to colloquially and culturally refocus his own very modern monomyth. He’s an exciting rapper worth tracking with. You can hear MASTER SWORD over on Bandcamp. [CJ Simonson]
SUSS – BIRDS & BEASTS
Genre: Ambient, Alt-Country
Favorite Tracks: “Flight,” “Beasts”
SUSS songs move with the urgency of tumbleweeds. The New York band famously describes their sound as ambient country—to the point that it is their (long-unused) Twitter handle—that’s a fair assessment. SUSS, currently a three-piece, cite Ennio Morricone’s spaghetti western scores and Brian Eno’s groundbreaking ambient works as equally foundational, and it doesn’t feel like they’re just saying that; the band makes sweeping, impressionistic soundscapes out of pedal steel, harmonica, fiddle, and mandolin, creating the sorts of songs that have the impression of stillness until the final seconds of the track reveal how far they’ve come.
BIRDS & BEASTS, SUSS’s fifth LP, is their liveliest, the one most clearly in motion. Lead single “Flight” is one of their most energetic songs to date, guitars and violins clearly pushing forward rather than being dragged; “Restless,” too, has a sense of flow, a rise and fall, as guitars rush in and out of focus. Even the opening track, “Birds,” which at less than four minutes is basically just an intro by SUSS standards, swells and buzzes with finger-picked guitar, constantly building tension over its runtime, even as the song never gets particularly loud or abrasive.
The final two tracks on BIRDS & BEASTS, which together make up nearly half its runtime, are also worth mentioning. They’re both the longest SUSS songs to date (barring their album-length collaboration with Andrew Tuttle), and they’re two of the most impressive. Where “Birds” nearly suggests a buildup, “Beasts” actually does grow denser as it goes on, keys adding a levity to the dusty static that gets more and more overpowering as the track nears its end. At its climax, though, things pull back, and a sweep of violin hangs in the air to bring “Beasts” to a subtle close and set the stage for the closing “Migration.” The song is one of the oldest on BIRDS & BEASTS and is the only one to feature contributions from founding member Gary Leib, who passed away in 2021. It’s the most ominous, fullest-sounding song on the album, warbling harmonica gesturing towards seasickness and strings that seem to announce the arrival of a serial killer in a film; as “Migration” wears on, it transforms, slowly, into an entirely different song, one built on ghostly, indistinct vocal samples and stabs of burbling synth. It’s unlike the pastoral soundscapes that comprise the rest of BIRDS & BEASTS, but it’s a fitting closer for the album, both in its incorporation of Leib’s work and in its harkening back to the earlier, more cinematic SUSS material, like on GHOST BOX. Grab it on Bandcamp and let yourself slip away. [Zac Djamoos]
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