Pitchfork

Originally a Japan-only release, Films, Sonic Sum's follow-up to their 2000 debut Sanity Annex, has been unavailable on these shores for the past four years. It's not hard to see why. Rob Sonic, Def Jux solo artist and the sole MC between Sonic Sum's three globe-scattered producers, works in note-card lyricism, avoiding things like breath control, fluid enjambment, or narrative. Examples from Films of his evacuated line breaks, grating twenty-dollar flourishes of polysyllabic, Latinate words, and asinine emphatics ("UN-inter-EST/ Ready to AD-minister RE-flex, HA-mmer, WA-ter drips") could fill double-wide Moleskine.

Subject matter is non-existent. That's an intentional move, of course, giving Sonic carte blanche to splatter "underground" tropes of programming, city-as-The-Matrix malaise, romantic disappointment dressed up as city-as-The-Matrix malaise ("Emergency!/ Override!/ Won't confide in you!" from "Negatives"), and, of course, people who just don't get it. And if the box for style, poetics, and form goes unchecked, the same vacancy, sadly, would have to appear in the every-sticky space known as persona. Sonic so clearly sounds a graduate of the Aesop Rock school of monotone-as-solemnity. When he ejects monosyllabic imperative nuggets-- "Dislodge/ Distill/ Quit job/ Sit still" (from "Choking Victim")-- there's no shift in timbre or exigency. This is rap as summary.

Though there is a more than enough sin in the melodies of Films (patchouli-scented, ambling guitar riffs and glib "vintage" news reel dialog samples are the nastiest sonic refrains), the album has a few effective Def Jux melodies. "Rocket" has an eventide of misty snares rising over shadowy synths; there's a surprisingly bedroom-ready sitar and slick bell section duel on the title track.

The problem is that the other three producers besides Sonic-- Fred Ones, Preservation, and Eric M.O.-- never stray to far from dirgy, mid-tempo "burners." Their missteps interlock: Fred Ones' "Films" is a series of rusted guitar loops over a series of synthpop basslines. Eric M.O. tries to bliss out his hi-hats so much they smear in to nothingness under night-sky synths. The melodies, like the lyrics, shovel and crowd instead of shaping and deliniating. The beat guys get to at least share the blame.

Taking Rob Sonic and Films to task isn't fun. In every interview, and even on the fleetingly passable moments here, Sonic comes across as the type of MC you'd like to see succeed: He knows where he comes from (the D.C. 'burbs, for the record), he confesses his influences and musical loves, and he's appropriately wary about hip-hop's perceived disconnect with a common reality. But desire and ambient political awareness do not a microphone controller make. As he's busy defining and decrying the other MCs, contradicting his own proletariat love ("Who complains more than the basic/ Complacent/ Patience"), Sonic perhaps gets closer the mirror than he'd like, "Me sitting cramped, flanked by my/ Forget it/ Reminding you of how much better someone else said it."