Review Long Deferred

faults, lies, and faultlines. Katastrophe. 2005.

When I ordered this CD, I meant to write a review fairly quickly. But with CDs, I tend to want to let them sit in my head for a while, to give myself a chance to figure out when I want to come back to them. And the first time I listened to fault, lies, and faultines, it didn't quite get stuck in my head (with the possible exception of the first song, "The Life." I wanted to listen to it more, understand it deeper, penetrate the lyrics, but I didn't immediately love it. So, taking a month to listen to it occasionally, and to come back to it whenever I wanted, I've discovered exactly how wonderful it is.

There's an amazing level of depth and complexity in this CD, both in terms of layers of sound and layers of meaning. It's a little different than Let's f*ck and then talk about my problems, which I feel does a lot of work toward establishing a persona for katastrophe. This album seems to wrestle more with issues and individual choices, from "Diamond rings," which claims "I'm fine, without those diamond rings attached to price tags. I'd make a nice dad, but I'm not taking any chances in a word that takes advantage" to "all wrong" which says "It doesn't matter if you even like me anyway. 'cause you don't live my life and I don't know what it's like for you. So you mind yours and I'll mind mine and everybody can get along just fine." And katastrophe doesn't back away from trans identity and trans issues in this CD; queer and trans issues are integrated throughout the album, sometimes coded and sometimes direct, but very clearly part of a larger identity and larger issues with which the album wrestles.

The first song on the CD, "The Life," is a collaboration with Shaggy Manatee and Ruby Valentine of Romanteek. The several voices within the song make it a lot of fun, and it's a great song to dance to. The chourses of "break down" and "drop a line" and "read me" similarly compell me to dance and sing along. Other songs feature pointfivefag and jb rap (Juba Kalamka and Jeree Brown of Deep Dick Collective), cindy wonderful of Scream Club, and aggracyst. The entire album is a beautiful balance between multiple layers of katastrophe's unique voice and collaborations that add interesting complementary voices, demonstrating a commitment to a queer hip hop/rap community. It also has a great tension between brilliant lyrics and poetry I want to listen to and fun beats I want to dance to.

And I must mention "fake meat" which is a wonderfully witty rumination on insecurity, both personal and financial. Katastrophe even reminds us that "I ain't proud to let y'all know money come in slow, so dig deep and we'll all sleep easy," which, oddly enough, rather than irritating me that he's asking for money, actually makes me want to send some to him. I think I'll order a replacement for that long lost copy of his first album now. Anyway, I highly recommend this CD, but it took me some time thinking about it before I really fell in love with it. The more I listen to the lyrics, the more impressed I am.