If there’s one topic that is guaranteed to be touched upon in a Californian’s Rap album, it’s marijuana. And although the Magic Heart Genies’ latest album Cardiac Arrest has no shortage of weed references, that’s about the only aspect of the project that fits any kind of Hip Hop cliche. Besides creative instrumentals, and enough off-beat rhyming to make the listener wonder what other drugs besides herb Myka 9, JtheSarge and DJ Drez may have consumed while recording their latest collaboration, they even manage to make a track about yoga positions.
Designed to be a continuation of their 2008 LP entitled Heartifact, the Magic Heart Genies’ most recent album consists of tracks with skits scattered between that help the listener envision a narrative tale. The comic book cover art that Cardiac Arrest boasts furthers the storytelling concept, however the execution of the album’s actual songs make any story it is trying to tell very hard to follow. Vocals are distorted and compressed in a manner that makes them very hard to comprehend, and at times the lyricists are rapping (or rather speaking, since they have a knack for staying off beat for much of the first half of the album) too fast to really process the words they’re putting out. Poetic musings that one may even go so far as to label “hippie magniloquence” create an abstract listening experience that will undoubtedly prove to be too much to handle for most listeners.
Although a rough start to the album eventually leads into a slightly more solid post-halftime appearance from the west coast trio, it’s still not enough to get the listener to even begin to forget about Cardiac Arrest’s shortcomings. Canibus-style multisyllabic nerd raps meet the rhythmic ability of William Hung on tracks such as “Use Your Head,” and even if one takes the title of the track literally, they would be lucky to make any sense of the sounds they’re hearing. In many cases the instrumentals are the only glimmer of hope amidst the lyrical snafu that plagues the majority of the album. The tracks that stand out as being the best in the bunch are the ones that are the easiest on a listener’s ears, namely “Get Down High,” “Dream Catcher,” “We Live, We Die…” and “Hands of Time.” If the album had stopped at “Hands of Time,” a mellow, spoken word style track with thought-provoking, easily deciphered bars such as “time flows, time is now, and so on and so forth, a courseless course, a forceless force, an everburning torch,” the project would have been better off. Instead three bonus tracks are thrown in the mix, with the “Get Down High” remix closing out the LP with an audible mess of confusing sounds.
Cardiac Arrest is not an album for everyone. It is barely an album for anyone. A sense of forced creativity simply for the sake of straying from norms will leave the Magic Heart Genies’ latest as an unpleasant afterthought in many listeners’ memories. Despite Myka 9’s strong reputation in the west coast’s underground, at the end of the day, Cardiac Arrest will just be too much for Hip Hop followers to digest.
