Dead Channel Sky

Cinematic storytelling is nothing new for clipping. – and, with a vocalist who’s halfway to an EGOT, that ‘Dead Channel Sky’ is akin to a rollercoaster big-screen thriller is wholly expected - but nevertheless, it really is an epic masterpiece.

Dead Channel Sky doesn’t introduce any radical new ideas and rather stays with the source material. However, in times when Gibson’s futures have already aged and some of his villains shape politics, Clipping revoke cyberpunk’s countercultural charge with extraordinary energy.

Dead Channel Sky is clipping. at their most techno-shocked, reconnecting with the nexus of hip-hop and sci-fi fused by pioneers like Afrika Bambaataa in the early '80s.

Diggs finds all of the quicksilver tales of sex, drugs and violence that '90s gangsta rap used to trade in — except here, they're wired together yet dislocated, provocative yet impersonal. Hutson and Snipes gleefully resurrect the adrenalized club beats of that same era, with occasional breathers that flirt with the ambience of Massive Attack or Tricky when darkness starts to suffer the threat of dawn, all tied together with the static pulse of electricity and the flow of information.

While the album is their longest yet (20 songs), it rarely feels like anything close to a slog.

Though it may not match its forebears’ ambition or near-flawless execution, the speculative and nostalgic centrifuge spinning like a catherine wheel at the heart of the record assures listeners of the usual cutting insights, by way of brazen bars and some of the finest storytelling of the group’s career.

The result is a little bit cyberpunk, a little bit Blade blood-rave, and — in typical clipping. fashion — wholly unique.

It never quite reaches the potential of a fully-formed imaginary future world, as Future Sounds of London managed so effortlessly decades ago. It’s a cool and exciting album, but it doesn’t dream of electric sheep.