Superego: Nautilus | 4ZZZ Brisbane 102.1FM

- It’d be easy to think of Superego as conscious-hip-hoppers, but, on their new EP, that isn’t what they really are. The name is sort of misleading. What was once Pow! Negro is now Superego: a struggle to establish who you are; a roiling, unsettled identity; an attempt to move from in-your-face, break-your-nose rage to something more collected, settled, stronger; a middle-path between rage and hopelessness. We’re not there yet, though: this is like the chaos before you get to being conscious.

The superego is a Freudian concept: the moral centre of the mind, prescribing what’s okay and what’s out-of-bounds. At the outset of the record it doesn’t seem like the search for it is easy. The hard-ass, Living Colour funk is gone, but in its place, opening cut Typist unleashes much more of the sort of bassy electronic attack that Death Grips crash about with. Oh, and if you’re wondering about the name change, “Don’t ask me shit.” Well, musicians never like to be asked, do they? The pure rage that thunders through the first two-thirds of the track, with the vocals pitch-shifted down for the perfect, psychotic, MC Ride impression, burns itself out: “...if I can’t see past this haze in my heart / How can I make it? Am I dead from the start?” Nelson Mondalane twists himself into ever smaller, tighter circles, trying to find the answer in a kind of manic depression which comes surging back to mania at the end, where “destruction is as important as creation.” “Embrace it!” he proclaims.

Simulacra does just that, roaring back, full power, another brutal attempt to find authentic identity in the face of endless opinions on what you should be. The simulacra, the inauthentic, inadequate version that everyone expects, crashes and burns across the course of the track. Nautilus isn’t all fire, however. At first I didn’t quite get the idea of the nautilus as a retreat into the shell, a deep introversion, until I listened a bit further into the EP and found a track like Caller ID. It’s haunted by the same issues, but they’re expressed as the flipside of the manic fury that came before. The focus is a failure to self-actualise resulting in a desperate, hopeless clutching on to someone else; a vampiric attachment to their identity: “I can’t live, myself / You know that I’m falling / I’m counting on you calling.” I don’t know who raps the spot in the middle, but somebody gets their Robert del Naja on pretty hard - great Massive Attack throwback.

The Superego interlude at the center of the EP is an interesting clarification of the terms of the record and almost certainly one of the few interludes in existence that has something useful to say. It spins through a sci-fi soundscape of swirling noise and treated vocals, spitting Freudian jargon  like some kind of tripped out psychoanalysis. Finally it levels the question: “Why is your ego dead?” Ego here is, again, the Freudian concept, the ability to negotiate your way through life, rather than the popular misconception of an ‘80s, Gordon Gekko style self-infatuation; and that’s the whole game for Superego: between futile rage and useless self-pity - how do I find my way?

Last Tango is nominally about ‘fear and excitement right before making a life-altering decision’ but it also starts to hone in on racial identity, a recurring theme in the back half of Nautilus. It makes Sampa The Great the perfect guest on Outer Body Stranger. The whole of her album, The Return was a search for just this sort of selfhood. She plays a kind of ancestral spirit guide in amongst the spacey boom-bap, gently jabbing Nelson along in his search within: “Mirror mirror on the wall / What’s your intention?” It’s not all gentle though, catching fire as it closes, heralded by the rather terrifying delivery of the line “The heart turns to fear us.” It’s a little hard to decipher the lyrics as everything becomes crazily distorted and loud but I think it’s actually a positive conclusion: “The journey to the center of us / They can’t fear us!” Still, it comes across as fireily ambiguous.

That’s only compounded by EP closer and early single, Burn. There’s a lot of firepower on Nautilus but nothing quite as crushing as this thoroughly Death Grips channeling powder-keg. An explosive mix of colonialism, climate-change and the brutal, unacknowledged experience of people of colour; it really takes no prisoners:  “Body bags / Body stacked, stacked bodies stacked, bodies stacked / People caged on islands /  Children drowning out to sea / A system’s history of violence / I Pray it don’t beat me / Till I’m black / Till I’m black / Still I’m black / Still I’m black.”  In a record that’s all about the search for identity, it’s a stark reminder that some people don’t get to choose for themselves. The cool heart of the EP returns to the same roiling chaos from which it emerged; and that’s just the reality, sometimes.

There are some great beats on Nautilus and they’re matched by equally great lyrics. It’s almost bizarre that a record so tormented by burning, unanswered questions of identity can present so perfectly. It’s a hackneyed way to sum up Superego’s work, but there’s truth in the old adage: great pain produces great art.

- Chris Cobcroft.
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