Elucid - Valley of Grace

Pitchfork 75

When he was growing up, Chaz Hall’s parents dragged him to church every Sunday—back-to-back services in the morning, and a third after a brief reprieve at Old Country Buffet. At some point, he started skipping dinner, slinking to the back of the sanctuary, teaching himself how to operate the equipment at the mixing board. Soon he was recording himself, alone in a empty room.

Over the course of the aughts, Hall—aka Elucid—embedded himself in the labyrinthine world of underground rap in New York. His music can be difficult to find: much of it came out under short-lived or one-off artist names, as collaborations with producers, other rappers, or both. But in the past few years, Elucid’s name has come to the forefront, both as a solo artist and as one-half of the duo Armand Hammer, with his Backwoodz Studioz label mate, billy woods.

Elucid’s music can also be difficult, or at least seem unapproachable. It’s full of knotty, dense writing and supremely technical passages. Yet unlike plenty of underground rappers (and major-label artists, for that matter), he’s uniquely attuned to melody and song structure. Even when he breaks convention, his intent seems to be clear; his delivery is an intoxicating blend of the gruff and guttural and something more melodic. His LP from last year, Save Yourself, was a collage of heartbreak and ambition that takes dozens of listens to properly unpack; it grappled with love, gentrification, and the corrosive nature of religious institutions.

His latest work, a half-hour dispatch called Valley of Grace, has songs titled “self care is a revolutionary act” and “strength is admired humanity is denied.” Where Save Yourself was in certain ways inextricable from New York (Elucid has made camp in Brooklyn, Queens, and elsewhere over the last couple of decades), Valley of Grace was written and recorded in Johannesburg and Cape Town, and taps into something more ethereal. It’s thoughtful, considered, and among the most ambitious rap records to come out this year.

“Colonizers corpse,” for example, sounds straightforward and up-tempo, but is written in a way that throws Elucid into a series of scenes where the spiritual stakes keep increasing: at first, roadside vendors are running after escaped chickens with cleavers, later a “gunned-down” child’s soul runs with the same desperation. He ends the song with “Self-appointed poet laureate of the Niggerati/hard copy/I am not my body,” allowing those words to give way to forty seconds of ear-splitting distortion that open the next track before hopping back in: “Watching America burn from distant shores/I learned to walk hot coals before I left the East coast.”

Valley also features some of Elucid’s most adventurous production: see “talk disruptive for me,” which sounds like the climaxes of three different movies played on top of one another. “she’d rather be a cyborg than a goddess,” which accounts for fully one-third of the tape’s running time, flits back and forth between (and occasionally merges) cold, industrial textures with warmer tones, the latter coming via very lo-fi samples.

Along with frequent appraisals of America’s current state and deeply entrenched hypocrisy on race, the topic that Elucid returns to most is the state of his body. From the hot coals under his feet to the “clear and present danger” to his physical form (“no release”), Valley of Grace frequently feels, by its very existence, like an act of defiance. Perhaps he says it best himself: “I’m no prisoner/Your indifference and silence speaks volumes/I pray the wrath of my ancestors surrounds you.” With this record, Elucid has taken sharp, maximalist writing, music that’s very nearly avant-garde, and distilled each down to its core elements.