Ecid - Economy Size goDD Costume
Fill in the Breaks, 2007
Do you ever get that feeling that reality is out to destroy you? That most of your whole life has been a waste of time? That society breeds us to adopt and display personalities not our own? That our hero’s are false, life is nothing more than boring, and that even pessimists are full of crap? Enter pessimist extraordinaire and poetic extremist Ecid, a Minnesotan hip hop artist who does it all; write, rap, produce, tour, co-found and run a label, release an average of 2 albums a year, and still find time to express relentless negativity about life in his art. Yup, I did say poetic extremist, because Ecid absolutely goes off. Lyrics take the forefront on this album, and he has a powerful voice and imagination to bring it there.
In “Re-Seeding Skyline”, he describes a Kevorkian-like doctor offering him euthanasia as a way to escape all the suffering he is going through. At first Ecid is enticed by the offer, but soon after becomes angered by the doctor’s pettiness in profiting off the death of others, and decides he’d rather live with the sorrow and propaganda than give a single cent to the powers bent on driving him to destruction. Besides weaving imaginative stories, count on him to speckle fanatical quotes in most of his songs. “If hip hop was really dead, there’d be nobody complaining about it, brick walls and bus stops would be completely spotless, shitty demo tapes would be harder to find than Bin Laden and the record labels would let all the MC’s keep the profits.” — Crooke Cologne. “I used to have a lot of friends. But real friends require maintenance. Now I just have a lot of ‘Yes Men’ looking to steal my so-called ‘Greatness’. I’m not famous, I’m a sell-out in the making.” — The Art Of Losing It. When it comes to delivery, Ecid has no well-defined cadence structure and sometimes squishes his words together just to get his lengthy messages across. While such feats are capable by some of hip-hop’s best MC’s, Ecid tends to have a bit of a lazy pronunciation, where he doesn’t quite articulate rushed consonance. That means you’ll find yourself rewinding a song occasionally just to decipher what he just said. The beats are up-tempo, dark, dusty, and psychological. Although not overly polished, they blend together to create a complete and intense cynic experience.
I would recommend any body check out a few songs of his at least. He has vocal strength, ingenious imagination, good lyrics, and made an album that feels complete from front to back. While he does take brooding to a new level, and doesn’t quite come correct on word-for-word delivery, Economy Size goDD Costume’ is a masterful work of hip-hop art in general.
