On new album 'Crisis Tales', hip-hop collective Curse ov Dialect make a racket so cathartic only an iron lung could prevent you from being moved, writes SHAUN PRESCOTT.

Curse Ov Dialect isn’t a name you hear bandied about during household discussions on Australian hip-hop. There are a few factors in their favour for the self-described “discerning” hip-hop fan though, putting them at odds with the “uncultured” masses. They don’t lampoon Australian festival culture (leaving no room for the perceived valorisation of boofheads), they aren’t playlisted on triple j and labels overseas respect them enough to release their material. They’re righteous like The Herd but much weirder, funny like Pez but not too uncomfortably so, and they’re eminently pop-focused like the Hilltop Hoods but in a detailed, labyrinthine and disorientating way.

It’s not like the Australian public doesn’t have an appetite for clever lyricism, because despite what naysayers will have you believe, there’s plenty of wit in most “skip-hop”, and particularly among those groups most ignored or detested by elitists. But Curse Ov Dialect are among the best because their “Australianness” is completely beside the point. The core Curse Ov Dialect crew consists of members with Maori, Maltese, Indian, Pakistani and Macedonian ancestry, and the guest MCs come from Japan, Austria, Bulgaria, Poland, the US, Switzerland and plenty of other nations. As for the music, it draws from so many cultures and musical heritages as to render classification within hip-hop’s elastic bounds futile.

Australia still gets a well-deserved earful though. Opening track ‘Identity’ sees the core MCs make a mockery of Anglo Australian dominance in a society borne of colonial atrocities and still coming to terms with the refractory nature of multiculturalism: “Refugees have love for where they’re landing, served English with Anglo-Saxon planning/Accents – you fail to name check – Aussie is undefined as a concept.” Rhymes are delivered in high-octane, well-enunciated phrases - gracious, measured and unerringly mellifluous. Kaleidoscopic samples and melodies weave among the lyrics and supplement the righteous, commanding rhymes with vivid global collages.

“'Crisis Tales' is a maximal cluster fuck of references, lectures, wordplay and contorted surrealism. It’s a result of a hip-hop generation tanked with input and ever greedy for more.”

It’s a pop album with hooks that take centre stage for one verse before disappearing to make room for ever more arresting ones. There are always a number of things happening at once here, so be warned: Crisis Tales is a maximal cluster fuck of references, lectures, wordplay and contorted surrealism. It’s a result of a hip-hop generation tanked with input and ever greedy for more, eager to be overloaded by disparate textures and unorthodox style/aesthetic/philosophical cohabitation.

Volk Makedonski’s opening salvo during ‘Media Moguls’ sounds like William Gibson attempting to rewrite Ulysees, while ‘Colossus’ boasts more than 10 MCs from all over the world in a gesture that positions hip-hop as a truly global musical language. The pace rarely ever slows but on the rare occasions when it does it’s really disappointing. You just want this music to keep charging and diving and mowing down the hapless until you’ve run out of steam: it’s an anodyne for restlessness and frustration.

Crisis Tales is ambitious and intelligent hip-hop, but it sits in a diplomatic region where head and body co-exist. We can be advised that “85 percent of us are totally ignorant” and be, well, completely ignorant of the fact. There are no slow burning, sober-eyed state of the union speeches here, and despite their forthright disdain for ignorance and injustice it never feels like we’re just being spoken down to or chastised.

And if Curse Ov Dialect must be framed against their national peers, that’s the aspect that most recommends them: a reckless, spirited urgency married with music so cathartic only an iron lung could prevent you from being moved.

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Crisis Tales is out now through Mistletone.