Review: Armand Hammer & the Alchemist’s Haram Generates a Manic, Grisly Atmosphere

The nature of repurposing found recordings means that sampling is a medium that can provoke both life-affirming nostalgia, as with the Avalanches’s Since I Left You, and death-embracing doom, as with the Caretaker’s Everywhere at the End of Time. The grisly Haram, a collaboration between New York City underground hip-hop duo Armand Hammer and producer the Alchemist, decidedly elicits the latter.

In many ways a critique of the legacy of slavery and colonialism, Haram possesses a manic, catastrophic atmosphere, almost as if the Alchemist were attempting to distill those crimes against humanity into sound. Throughout, the album’s 14 tracks unravel into convoluted tangles of disembodied voices, discordant jazz piano, and droning synths.

Armand Hammer, which consists of rappers Billy Woods and Elucid, has mastered a stream-of-consciousness lyrical delivery that often prioritizes images, sensation, and rhythmic tension above easy comprehension. On “Roaches Don’t Fly,” for example, Elucid empowers himself as the world falls apart: “Still up at dawn, shifting forms, new resolve, guns go off/Guns go off, smoke and fire, light and sound/My new name colonizers can’t pronounce.”

The group also turns their attention to the taboo, the immoral, and the inhumane: Where one’s first instinct might be to look away in disgust or horror, they would rather scrutinize, poke, and prod, and exaggerate the taboo. On “Indian Summer,” Woods recalls moving back to the U.S. from Africa, painting a hellish landscape out of the racism encountered in American suburbia and declaring, without the slightest hesitation, “I swore vengeance in the seventh grade/Not on one man, the whole human race/I’m almost done, God be praised.”