I'm lucky I have a friend who runs a Google search on Dean Blunt every week or so, because otherwise I probably would have missed this new eight-track release from the predictably unpredictable British artist, uploaded in near-surreptitious fashion to Hyperdub's Tumblr. Too soon to tell whether this means that Dean Blunt is back with Hype Williams' old label alma mater, but it's called Babyfather, and it includes a couple tracks—"Son" and "War Report"—that you may have already seen floating around YouTube as "freestyles."
Though he released something of a "rock" album with last year's Black Metal on Rough Trade, we've been seeing Blunt turning his gaze to the trappings of contemporary hip-hop culture over the past year or so, dropping "poems" trolling masculine rap braggadocio and even publishing a book, Ciroc Boys, full of bottle service club receipts. Babyfather skews toward the latter obsession, with one particularly eyebrow-raising tune—"Gass"—consisting almost entirely of a loop of Nicki Minaj spitting Ya'll got everybody infiltrating negros on Meek Mill's "I Be On That." My personal favorite so far, though, is the ever-so-slightly grimey "Coco," which borrows its synth sample from Dizzee Rascal's 2004 album track "Hype Talk," and contains one too many tongue-in-cheek "Loyal" references for comfort. Download Babyfather here, and listen to a rip of "Coco," below.
