Pillars of Ivory - The Biblical Scripturez (Doublemint Green Vinyl)

When you try to combine rap with hardcore, you can get into very dicey territory very quickly. But when you love both rap and hardcore, you can find ways to do it where you’re not just puffing out your chest on some Limp Bizkit shit. In the ’00s, the Wilkes-Barre band Cold World figured out one approach. Cold World are pretty much a straight-up hardcore band, but they’d use occasional samples, and their records would have drops from people like Jim Jones and Max B. Eventually, they collaborated with rappers like Sean Price and Kool G Rap, and the results did not sound like the Judgment Night soundtrack. Right now, there’s another group out there finding a fusion, and it’s a strange and fascinating one.

A whole lot of people in the hardcore world love Griselda or Three 6 Mafia or whatever, but some people go further, and one of them is Jay Petagine, frontman of the great Hudson Valley band Mindforce. Petagine won my eternal affection last year when he talked about Mariah Carey and Roc Marciano in a podcast interview, and he’s also one of the members of the side project Pillars Of Ivory, which also has people from bands like Death Threat and Age Of Apocalypse. Last year, Pillars Of Ivory released two demos, Genesis Demo nd Exodus Demo, that played out as long single tracks. Really, those songs were more like DJ mixes. Chopped-up boom-bap samples, some of which would use bits and pieces of music from Tears For Fears or Goblin, would suddenly lurch into intense riff-stompers, and then back again. It shouldn’t have worked, but it did.

Today, Pillars Of Ivory have compiled those two demos onto the awesomely-titled new LP The Biblical Scripturez. Both of those demos are around 13 minutes long, and both play out as single tracks. The album also features one new song, the five-minute “Leviticus,” which follows the same format — emotional synth-drones, cut-up Fat Joe vocals, boom-bap drums, sudden eruptions of metallic hard-stomp mosh music. This might be a tough sell, but if you give it a chance, it will sneak up on you - Stereogum