It's tempting to start any discussion of Cadence Weapon's music by naming, or trying to name, other notable Canadian rappers.
The very idea probably sounds like a punch line to American listeners, which may be why his stellar debut "Breaking Kayfabe" has taken two years to make it to U.S. shores.
Cadence Weapon, whose real name is Rollie Pemberton, dropped out of college with a 4.0 GPA to pursue music.
Pemberton - encouraged by his father, a Brooklyn transplant who formed an early Canadian rap scene in the 1980s - recorded, wrote and produced "Breaking Kayfabe" entirely by himself.
Cadence Weapon may be the only person who can make the mean streets of Edmonton sound as vicious as those of any American metropolis.
That's not to say he's anything close to a drugs-and-guns poseur; nor is he a hard-bitten underground crusader against rap excess. "Breaking Kayfabe" is largely free of self-aware, indie-rap cliches about one's place in the uncomfortable context of modern hip-hop.
It also lacks the angry, arrhythmic rhyming that characterizes peers like Atmosphere and Sage Francis - to paraphrase Lauryn Hill, "indie rap" is code for "no skills." Except for a hidden-track remix, it also lacks any MC but Cadence Weapon himself - a rarity on any rap record, indie or otherwise.
What the album does have is ludicrously top-notch production, mashing together Nintendo synths and glitchy
beats into something entirely fresh. Glitchy soundscapes "Oliver Square" and "Black Hand" host alternate-universe flow, dispatching critics and ex-girlfriends alike with self-conscious couplets. It's hard to believe this is a one-man job.
"Vicarious," hidden near the end of the album, is a mind-bending descent into eight-bit hell, chronicling a female friend's downward spiral into self-destruction. It's one of the best rap tracks - one of the best songs of any kind, really - of the past few years.
"Breaking Kayfabe" is available now on Epitaph.
Reach the reporter at: samuel.gavin@asu.edu.
