In an era when eclecticism is just another genre option, true hip hop innovation is hard to find. The California-based Anticon collective does better than most in trying to raise the stakes. Label honcho and cLOUDDEAD mainman Odd Nosdam has assembled a 33-track collage to represent the best of Anticon's output to date—although given the ceaselessly disorienting nature of the collaging it sometimes seems like 133. As with the recent cLOUDDEAD album, moments of beauty arise from the most unlikely juxtapositions. Detractors may detect a stoner white-boy slackness to all this. Me, I think that if Moe Tucker or Pere Ubu had come along a generation or two later they would have been on Anticon.

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