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**cLOUDDEAD - cLOUDDEAD**
★★★★☆

They called it quits after just one proper album, but cLOUDDEAD's brief existence left ripples that are still being felt in experimental hip-hop circles two decades later. The trio of Doseone, why?, and odd nosdam dissolved almost as mysteriously as they had formed, leaving behind a singular statement that sounds like nothing that came before or since. Their 2001 self-titled debut remains a fascinating artifact of millennial anxiety wrapped in the strangest beats you've ever heard.

Today, cLOUDDEAD exists as a cult touchstone, the kind of album that gets passed around like a secret handshake among heads who think they've heard everything. It's the record that proved hip-hop could be deconstructed and rebuilt into something entirely alien while still maintaining its essential DNA. Pitchfork crowned it one of the best albums of the 2000s, and its influence can be traced through the work of Death Grips, clipping., and countless bedroom producers who learned that beats don't have to knock to be effective.

The album sounds like what would happen if you fed a computer nothing but dusty vinyl samples, children's television shows, and pure neurosis, then asked it to make a rap album. Doseone's vocals float somewhere between spoken word poetry and nursery rhyme recitation, delivered in a nasal whine that shouldn't work but absolutely does. His stream-of-consciousness wordplay tackles everything from fast food anxiety to existential dread, often within the same breath. Meanwhile, why? provides occasional vocal counterpoint, his contributions feeling like transmissions from an even stranger frequency.

But the real star here is odd nosdam's production, which sounds like it was assembled from the contents of a thrift store's electronics section. Beats stutter and wheeze, samples are chopped beyond recognition, and melodies appear and disappear like half-remembered dreams. This isn't boom-bap, trap, or any other recognizable hip-hop subgenre – it's something entirely new, a sound that feels both ancient and futuristic.

The album's highlights reveal themselves slowly, requiring the kind of patience that most music doesn't demand. "Dead Dogs Two" builds from whispered vocals and skeletal percussion into something approaching a conventional rap song, if conventional rap songs were recorded in a fever dream. "And All You Can Do Is Laugh" layers Doseone's paranoid observations over a backdrop that sounds like a broken carousel, creating an atmosphere of beautiful unease. "Physics of a Unicycle" might be the closest thing to a single, with its almost-catchy hook and relatively straightforward structure, though "straightforward" is relative when discussing cLOUDDEAD.

The album emerged from the fertile underground scene surrounding the Anticon label, a collective of artists who seemed determined to push hip-hop into uncharted territories. Doseone had already made waves with his abstract rap group Themselves, while why? was developing the indie-folk-meets-hip-hop approach that would later make him a critical darling. Odd nosdam was crafting beats that sounded like they'd been transmitted from another dimension. When they came together as cLOUDDEAD, it felt like a natural evolution of their individual experiments, a chance to see just how far they could push their collective vision.

The project began with a series of 10-inch vinyl releases, each containing two tracks that felt like dispatches from a parallel universe where hip-hop had evolved along entirely different lines. These releases built a devoted following among adventurous listeners who were hungry for something, anything, that didn't sound like everything else. When these tracks were compiled into a full-length album, it felt like a statement of intent, a manifesto for a new kind of rap music.

Listening to cLOUDDEAD today feels like discovering a lost transmission from the early 2000s underground, when it seemed like anything was possible and genre boundaries were just suggestions. It's challenging, occasionally frustrating, and utterly unique – the kind of album that reminds you why music can be so exciting when artists are willing to risk complete failure in service of something genuinely new. That cLOUDDEAD disbanded after creating this singular vision only adds to its mystique, leaving us with a perfect encapsulation of a moment when hip-hop briefly glimpsed an alternate future.