Eclectic ‘Ghost rap’ artist from Rochester, NY, Hefe Heetroc aka Wez Nilez has just dropped his 12 track album entitled “The Shadow Cabal of the 8 Oligarchs”. As we’ve seen on some of the recent hip-hop outings in the last 2-3 years, it’s easier than ever for artists to get lost in the weight of their own work. The production walks over them and their guest artists rap louder than most – and, in the end, it becomes hard to distinguish if the artist at the helm is the master of his own work, or a curator of everybody else’s. Well, there’s no debating that on “The Shadow Cabal of the 8 Oligarchs”.
Hefe Heetroc thrives atop the scatterbrain production of each track, finding new ways to piece his flow together in the strangest of ways. Arguably the least-accessible songs, at times can hardly even be labeled simply as rap. Instead, raucous drums, squelching synths, and growling basses stumble their way into oblivion as Hefe Heetroc unhinges his flow into stutters, twists and bends. No production gets in his way, as its all part of the colorful creative puzzle, while features don’t exist at all. They probably wouldn’t be able to stick to Heetroc’s hectic lyrical script anyway.
“The Shadow Cabal of the 8 Oligarchs” is a weird, writhing package of alternative rap and it’s probably going to be the best album this genre has to offer this year. Sure it’s not for everybody, but then Hefe Heetroc is the Frank Zappa of rap. He is not looking for everyone’s approval, but rather in being the best that he can be with his craft.
Hence there are no compromises in the music as Heetroc focuses on his creativeness at the expense of catchy clichés. Not that this music is not ear-warming. There are plenty tracks that will attract your attention, some by the strength of their titles alone, like “Who The Fuck Is High As Me?”, “Manifest all the Minerals”, “We Move When We Rap Do Not Worry” or “Take That Toke That”.
Every song is hugely diverse from the next, whilst still maintaining a flawless cohesion. Whatever song comes next just makes sense somehow. Don’t ask me how, I can’t explain that. It just happens. From “Don’t Count on Me” and “Dirty Mind” to “Addiction Tonight”, you will be glued to the speakers, attempting to decipher the lyrics and navigate the sonic minefields Heetroc sets. It’s inevitable that with so much attention being given, the listener ends up feeling some sort of attachment to the sonic art at hand.
The music is beautifully chaotic in places, and sounds strangely relevant when it seems it shouldn’t. But the key to the whole package working, I believe, is that Hefe Heetroc seems so cocksure all the way through the album’s twelve-track runtime and his oblique and dynamic flow reflects just how confident he is in his mic skills and the production that supports it. The result is that Hefe Heetroc aka Wez Nilez is such an interesting artist because he fully believes in what he’s doing.
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