Hangar 18 Sweep The Leg

I approached Hangar 18's Sweep The Leg with trepidation. My main previous impression was a song called Comfort Inn, a proudly juvenile and misogynistic wallow that was a rare sour note on DJ Ese's best-Def-Jux-showcase-that-wasn't-actually-released-on-Def-Jux Side: Two.

Comedy and hip hop, or rapping anyway, are strangely intimate and distant at the same time. Many of the best rappers are intensely humorous, and even share the same skills and vocabulary with comics, obsessing over timing, control, and punchlines. There are differences, however. Braggadocio and sophomoric fixations often spark great emcees, but are anathema to good comedy. Dane Cook would probably be much better, for instance, if he were a rapper. Reconciling hip hop with content that is self consciously and explicitly trying to be funny is a sticky wicket mastered mainly by geniuses like Prince Paul, and often crumbles in the hands of humbler talents.

Stranger is the idea of a "funny" album on Def Jux, though the Party Fun Action Committee concept opus Let's Get Serious succeeded with merciless, skilful, and grotesque satire. Humour is a key component in El-P's bitter b-boy robot army, but it is mostly of the dark, mordant, stone-faced variety. Hangar 18, with their clear intention to crack jokes, risks taking the mugginess and clowning into the damned realm of the wack and corny. It's a pleasant surprise to find out that I over think these things, and Sweep The Leg turns out to be an entertaining if not spectacular addition to the Def Jux canon.

Hangar 18 turn out to have an understanding of crafting an album, restraining themselves from unleashing a vulgar boast on every single bar, and using tracks to explore a finite set of ideas and themes while varying them reasonably over the course of the whole. The key to making great funny full lengths as demonstrated by the grand master Prince Paul is realizing that without trying to make explicit punchlines right and left, the music itself can be thoughtfully funny while staying tight and invigorating for repeat listens. In fact, the purely musical exploration evident here does a great deal to lift the pounding street as fuck assault mode that Def Jux releases can stay in to the point of obscuring their impact. A little colour helps, and the production, mostly by DJ Pawl, has clearly improved and flourished as he explores different sounds and variations without entirely departing from the future damaged old school boom bap that Def Jux seems to have trademarked. The rapping, meanwhile, is mostly on point, more relaxed and assured and occasionally hilarious, and has thankfully departed from the constant cocky wackiness.

It's not that Sweep The Leg is entirely immune to that peculiar Def Jux exhaustion, where academic/hoodlum singsong choruses and relentless word onslaught verses (something El-P does transcendently, and others do dutifully) overwhelm with too much of a good thing, but enough space is given for the (much better than it has to be, percolating with little clever touches) production to breathe, and the relatively light-hearted lyrical content does not suffer from the same aggressive urban gloom above all else vibe of other Def Jux products. The album is good but not great, however standouts like Sad and epic handclap shuffle The West Wing can probably be nominated for inclusion among the label's classics, and both coincidentally feature solo jazz horns ingeniously deployed. Dark clouds hover on moments like Dance With Me, when Hangar 18 descends into caricatured middle school misogyny as if to prove they haven't grown up entirely. It is not their best mood, and Sweep The Leg generally proves they're tending towards better things these days.