B L A C K I E, Wilderness of North America

Out of the wilds of H-town’s indie scene comes…well, shit, the absolute weirdest, rawest, most uncompromising, and most intriguing hip-hop I’ve heard since that Justin Broadrick/Alec Empire collab, Curse of the Golden Vampire. Take equal parts fucked-up electronics, distorted pop-cult samples, guitar feedback, video game noise, and angry-as-hell street flow, set it on fire, and you might come up with B L A C K I E (the caps and spaces are apparently necessary). If you’re lucky.

Now, I’m not gonna lie — Wilderness of North America isn’t some Source-endorsed jam full of hits you can tip a glass of Kristal to. It’s downright hard to listen to at points, lurching around like an angry, bad-manners drunk taking swings at all and sundry. That said, if you can endure, there’s some brilliant, jaw-dropping stuff lurking in there.

The disc gets off to a bit of a slow start with “That’s Right,” a confused ball of wire that begins with an Abba sample, segues through a wall of noise into speaker-crushing bass tones and then into hard-ass rapping and back again; it’s an interesting combination, but it skips a step at times and leaves me scratching my head. Better is “Big Big Joke Jokes,” a short-and-sweet bitter burst that provides a glimpse of the good side of Wilderness to come. Things get better by the time “B L A C K I E …Is Still Alive” comes in, with its distorted Galaga(?) sounds, Cat Stevens sample, and trippy, echoey lyrics — it really shouldn’t work, but against all odds, it kinda does.

The album really kicks into gear with “I Write On Money,” though; after about the first five seconds, I found myself nodding and saying, “ah, okay…I get it now.” The distant-yet-heavy distorted drums, the siren-like guitars, the syrup-slow rhymes about writing weird-ass crap on dollar bills, it all of a sudden makes perfect freakin’ sense. B L A C K I E’s like a hip-hop head bred on Massive Attack, jazz, John Zorn, and DJ Screw, and he’s taken all of that in and spat it back out as this. Barring a few stumbles, tracks like “Caught, Lost,” “Knives Incorporated” (love the plunking guitar), and “You Followed” are incredible, all dark and heavy and grimy like most hip-hop artists wish they could be.

B L A C K I E (born Michael LaCour) gives himself away a bit with “You Followed,” which ditches the explicit rap stuff totally in favor of a brief interlude on some barren, gas-choked planet too close to an uncaring sun; dense, thick clouds of noise-haze drift across the sky, radiation pouring down in the gaps. “Copy Coma Edit” does something similar, coming off like Mike Ladd’s non-vocal moments — thundering beats, shimmering sound, and a sense of alien grandeur. The one that hits hardest, though, is “Filter,” which manages to meld menacing, sinister Massive Attack-esque electronic noise and a heartfelt (if kinda disturbing) profession of love. Top that, Kanye.