Blue Sky Black Death - Noir (2011)

Like Clams Casino's recent work, this veteran hip-hop production duo crafts versatile, moody instrumentals with a patient, steady beauty.

Blue Sky Black Death may want to do without guest vocalists for a little while. West Coast producers Kingston and Young God teamed up with a different low-key singer on each of their last couple of albums, but the real allure was still in the duo's layered, expansive instrumentals. Then there was the drama a few years back over Jean Grae team-up The Evil Jeanius; the New York MC went on Craigslist and MySpace to protest the "unauthorized" use of her rhymes (she said it wasn't the beat-makers' fault). BSBD have collaborated with plenty of other indie rappers, most recently including tourmates CunninLynguists, but their latest album suggests they can acquit themselves just fine on their own.

As Clams Casino's first beat tape earlier this year demonstrated, some of the best rap instrumentals these days can work equally well as moody electronic music, drifting naturally between the worlds of hip-hop or R&B and ambient, post-dubstep, or chillwave. Noir has a similar way of wringing strangely affecting emotional grandeur from the rudiments of sound, though BSBD's style relies less on glitch or drone and more on starry-eyed orchestral vastness. Using an impressively naunced deployment of strings, piano, and guitar as well as drum loops and hazy synths, the album has a patient, steady beauty, ranging from glowing panoramas evoking M83 to the classical-informed abstraction of Anticon acts like Dosh and Son Lux.

The duo's acronym is apparently skydiver slang, popularized in the 1994 thriller Drop Zone. It implies, "Sure, appreciate the majesty of nature all you want, but if something goes wrong you'll leave a grisly corpse." If Noir can't quite fully embody that essential paradox-- it's not particularly noir-ish, either-- it still succeeds in communicating incomprehensible hugeness through sonically detailed tracks with an almost narrative-like structure. There are several standouts, but a good place to start is "Sleeping Children Are Still Flying", which uses a humid Southern-rock guitar solo and languidly triumphant drum programming to support a string section, a children's choir, and a snippet of dialogue from classic 1986 coming-of-age drama Stand By Me: River Phoenix is talking about dreams, and missed chances. While the kids and the symphonic elements would have no trouble fitting in on an indie pop beach fantasy by Air France, those blues-drenched licks could just as easily soundtrack one of the Weeknd's dangerous liaisons.