Cadence Weapon - Hope In Dirt City

One of the first things you'll notice about Hope In Dirt City is that the last couple of mixtapes – releases which often doubled down on Cadence's trademark four-to-the-floor club electronics  – were something of a red herring. Despite having perfected a certain production style on his last LP, Cadence Weapon indulges an admirable itch to move into new territories and avoid resting on his laurels with Hope In Dirt City. Performing something of a one-eighty by keeping electronics to a minimum, the music is instead provided by a broad range of live-instrumentation with laid back jazz influences – a brand new direction for Pemberton, and one which suits him handsomely. Tracks like 'Jukebox' come to life with their resonate funk guitars and meandering horn samples weaving through the mix with flair, chopped up into clipped samples while retaining the spirit of their clearly human performances.

Aside from the musical overhaul, Pemberton is keen to keep his own performance evolving as well. Lead single 'Conditioning' is the most obvious instance of his attempts to branch out in terms of his vocal work – reconfiguring itself at its halfway point into something approaching a gospel and blues number, Pemberton's attempting a straight-up song in a way few could have anticipated. But that's not the only example: there's further flexing of melodic chops on the title track and 'There We Go', while numbers like 'Jukebox' give a small taster of what Cadence's (possibly wisely) abandoned rock-album project might've sounded like.

Meanwhile, that lyrical disdain for the hollowness of mainstream hip hop culture – that thing which made Cadence so uncommonly likeable for a rap artist in the first place – takes a giant leap forward from snide commentary to outright satire. Album highlight 'Hype Man' sees Pemberton use his poetry and  syllabic patterning to knit bona fide comedy, successfully lampooning both the vacuous hip-hop stars who abuse their protégées, as well as the plucky MCs which allow it to happen.

Hope In Dirt City ultimately finds Cadence Weapon putting out his most fruitful work yet, essentially by making the album an abandonment of almost everything we already knew he could do well. While Afterparty Babies was a juggernaut of floor-filling electronic masterpieces which reinvented and remixed themselves as they went along, Hope In Dirt City is admirably unwilling to repeat the process to potentially diminishing returns –  preserving his impeccable wit and tight-delivery, of course, but otherwise offering up a radical reinvention of his established sound.

In a sense, this makes Hope In Dirt City a less immediate record than its predecessors, and a great deal less likely to be blasting at club nights as well. But as an expression of artistic ambition – ambition which is largely fulfilled – Hope In Dirt City stands out as an impressive (and invigorating) proof that the high-achieving former poet laureate of Edmonton is eager to push his considerable talents into more and more exciting musical contexts.