Reissue This avant-garde hip-hop stuff is spreading faster than anti-Arab sentiment on September 12th.

You know the stuff of which I speak; hip-hop built from samples harder to grasp than a wall of Jell-O, whose time signatures change faster than a 15 year-old girl's fashion sense, all strung around beats dirtier than the old man asleep at the bus stop.

Innovators like cLOUDDEAD, El-P, and the Anticon Crew have been redefining what hip-hop is for years now, so it's nice that people are finally starting to take notice.

If you've been paying any attention, you know what's bound to happen next: the market will glut, and innovation will make way for imitation.

But first, Dälek returns to the scene, fresh off collaborations with Faust, Techno Animal and Kid606, with a sophomore album inventive enough to extend avant-garde hip-hop's stay in the limelight for, at the very least, a few more weeks.

(.) As an emcee, Dälek shows off a rare versatility, equally capable of straight rhyming and formless spoken word.

As a poet, Dälek has a grasp on subtlety that most will never approach. And as a collective, Dälek have achieved the seemingly impossible: successfully bridging the conventional and the experimental in a way that respects both at once.

It's a risky endeavor-- one that threatens to alienate fans of both disciplines. But it's this very risk that makes Dälek's music so very affecting.