Too Birds: Melbourne 2 | 4ZZZ Brisbane 102.1FM

- Do Too Birds seem out of place in Melbourne? They’re brutally distinct from most other hip hop in Australia, for sure. Having said that, wherever you put Too Birds they’d almost certainly be out of place; it’s kind of their thing.

There’s an innate fringiness to the crew, they present as anti-heroes, obsessing over their broken brains, bad habits and the downward spiral they travel in, toward personal destruction. As rapper Realname puts it: “I can only write a Too Birds song when I want to off myself, so they’re all about the same thing.” Up until now they haven’t been very visible in Australian music culture either: Too Birds have three full-lengths under their belt, but before now you’d have struggled to hear about them outside of Victoria. Even in their own scene they seem like they don’t really belong. They hang out with hardcore bands and get tacked on to the end of heavy guitar-music gigs, to the bemusement of punters. As one Killyourstereo reviewer said with little amusement: “The least heavy band on the bill.” Fair enough, although it does make sense of all that mental anguish -so out of place in the bragidocious world of hip hop- it’s hardcore all the way.

The trio of MC’s Teether and Realname, along with their producer, Mr. Society, do hail from Naarm / Melbourne, but like many good things in Australian urban music, I think at least part of what makes them attention-grabbing doesn’t have its origins here. Mr. Society, a Canadian export, is, to my ears, the key element in the sound of the new LP, Melbourne 2. There’s a notable evolution across Too Birds’ three full-lengths, a process which kicked off in 2016 with the lengthy mixtape, WHERE MY JACKET? Back then Mr. Society was on a nostalgic trip to the boom-bap of late-last-century, albeit a grim, fuzzy and lofi one. 2017’s i’m going to die sits roughly halfway between JACKET? and where we are now, amplifying the industrial/noise elements and winding through an obligatory strain of trap. Come ‘21 and those ominously increasingly volumes of fuzz and distortion have bloomed into a forest of white noise, festooning everything in ear-tearing abrasiveness.

Maybe because it’s such a recent development, nobody seems to have made the obvious Death Grips comparison. It’s not only Mr. Society doing his best Zach Hill impression, in that context Teether’s serviceable baritone becomes very reminiscent of MC Ryde. Fortunately Too Birds are no clone, not least because of Realname, who cuts a fine contrast to Teether, the treble of his nasally tenor slicing through that warm bass. His is also a very mannered sound, someone called him a white Danny Brown, which is, if not one-hundred-percent-accurate, not crazy either and, if you were looking for a homegrown comparison, he’s not a million miles away from the shriekiness of Simo Soo.

Ironically, as the music has aggressively risen to meet the bars from the rappers in power and pain, it’s often kind of hard to make out the spray of misanthropic lyrics. I guess that’ll mean more hours for the fans, on the headphones, puzzling out the maladjusted messages. Surely those fans will be tumbling along to Too Birds gigs too. However obscure they’ve been up till now, it’s like all the knobs on the board have been twisted in the right, horrifying direction. Too Birds are the messed up music you need to hear now.

- Chris Cobcroft.
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