The Hard Road Restrung (Review)

This is the most lavishly produced Australian hip-hop CD to date, capitalising on Hilltop Hood’s ARIA Awards for The Hard Road and its unprecedented entry into the ARIA charts at number one and subsequent platinum sales. The involvement of the Adelaide Symphony Orchestra – who joined the Hoods for a one-off live concert at the Adelaide Entertainment Centre on May 12, conducted by Benjamin Northey, arose from their work on the title track with the ASO String Quartet at the 2006 Aria Awards and Falls and Southbound festivals. The bulk of the arrangement work was carried out by Jamie Messenger, who had the daunting task of providing what is largely an orchestral underscoring of the original Hard Road album in which strings, brass and woodwinds predominate in an often jaunty, rather Disney-like amalgamation of the rather relentlessly monochrome rapping of MCs Suffa and Pressure with occasional coloratura orchestral sweeps, especially on the track ‘Conversations from a Speakeasy’. ‘There’s still a real hip-hop vibe to the music’, commented MC Pressure to Rolling Stone magazine; ’we haven’t gone all fruity or anything; you don’t have to break out your ballet slippers’.

Both the orchestra and the hip-hop suffer (no pun intended) from the inappropriateness of the collaboration. A number of the samples used on the initial album had to be removed as they clashed with the orchestra, but drums, scratches and 4/4 time still tend to predominate, along with a couple of irritating speeded-up voices. The few times the orchestra is in the clear, as in the 24 second intro to ‘What A Great’, or the hi-NRG Pet Shop Boys-like ‘The Captured Vibe’ (a comparison which would no doubt horrify the homophobic Hoods), it doesn’t succeed in sustaining much interest, with rather sickly string passages predominating. Any attempt at exploration of experimental textures a la Kronos Quartet or Ensemble Modern tends to be subverted by the rhythmic monotony of the Hoods’ delivery. One can hardly imagine members of the ASO ‘hanging at the back of the bar’ and the Hoods don’t exactly manage to trade in their hoodies for tuxedos, but banality is never far away. Restrung was never going to exceed the severe limitations of The Hard Road, despite the recruitment of US freestyle rapper Okwerdz, a rearrangement of the track order, and the addition of one new track ‘Roll On Up’. This is yet another repetitive exercise in self-aggrandisement which concludes the album with unconvincing shout-outs to Elefant Traks, Shogun and Hydrofunk, claims that ‘hip-hop’s no longer living in rock’s shadow’ and proclamation of ‘love for the homespun, cos we a dying breed and this loathsome’ (sic). While not as bombastic and banal as the cringe-worthy ENZSO, the NZ Symphony Orchestra’s mock-classical arrangements of Split Enz songs, there’s an uneasy clash between the lushly middle-of-the road film music quality of the orchestral score and the lack of variety and nuance in the Hoods’ delivery. Are they becoming hip-hop’s equivalent of Silverchair?