El-P, I'll Sleep When You're Dead

There is no denying the role played by Jamie Meline in hip-hop history. As El-P, a founder member of the group Company Flow, he helped create the New York independent hip-hop scene of the 1990s, and since the band split he has stuck to his guns. His label, Definitive Jux, is known for putting out serious-minded hip-hop, and this second solo album finds El-P once again carpet-bombing a series of abrasive and rattlingly nonconformist tracks with densely packed parcels of syllabic invective. The problem, however, is that Meline's work is often too deliberated and too dense to work on levels other than the intellectual. Tracks such as the epic opener, Tasmanian Pain Coaster, which features members of the Mars Volta, and Flyentology, the first single (featuring Nine Inch Nails' Trent Reznor), are technically magnificent and appealingly complex. But I'll Sleep ... is a record to be awed by rather than get involved with.