A stunning mashup of heavy beatscapes, surrealist avant hip hop, and spacey drones from beyond the wall of sleep. You might have guessed that Deadverse

Massive is an extension of the avant-hip hop duo Dalek, and this project has them teaming up with their friends in the heavy guitardrone unit Destructo

Swarmbots and hip hop mutant Oddatee. This gorgeous picture disc is the sum of it's parts, a surreal and drifting collage of beats and psychedelic drones,

powerful rhymes and voice transmissions, as informed by classic krautrock and cassette experiments as it is by actual hip hop. The a-side features three

tracks, and starts off with the instrumental "Son Of Concrete", a druggy swirl of submerged guitar notes ringing out over a murky thumping beat. You could

almost mistake it for a Troum track if it wasn't for the syrupy breakbeat buried beneath the muddy wash of spacey melodious keyboards. This moves directly

into "Caught Up In The Eight", a hallucinatory miasma of black power spoken word poetry, pipe organs and guitars swimming through all manner of psychedelic

sound effects, multiple voices muttering and yelling in the background, staticky television transmissions floating in and out of focus, fragments of melody

appearing and disappearing, all quite dreamlike and disorienting. This all drifts off into the final track on the side, "Bog", where the voices disappear,

leaving only the sound of backwards guitars playing a beautiful, mournful melody looping over and over till they fade into silence.

The b-side features just one track, the colossal "What I Knew Then", where the musicians move into more recognizeable hip hop territory. Mellow rhymes are

delivered over a pounding backbeat, surrounded by nebulous electronic drones and sampled voices buried way back in the background, delicate Fender Rhodes

like keys hammered out over the tracks's dark, dreamy atmosphere. Gradually the vocals retreat into the distance, and the track becomes more trippy and

formless, an expanse of psychedelic drones filled with soft smears of melody floating up from the Fender Rhodes, fragile bits of abstract wah-wah sounds,

looped noises, and shimmering guitar filigree. The last few minutes of the track wind down into a minimal percussive pulse that I mistook for a locked groove

at first, rattling over and over until it finally reaches the end.

Presented as an visually arresting picture disc, each side of the record an original piece of artwork from Paul Romano, the artist behind recent album

covers for Mastodon, Circle, Starkweather, and Withered, and held in a thick mylar sleeve with a metallic silver label across the top of the sleeve.