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What does confidence look like? It might be the sight of Elucid, the Queens-born rapper, calmly playing a swarm of ambience and hissing noise from his laptop, unfazed by the reality that Mississippi Studios is nowhere near capacity. Or it might be the spectacle of that same artist stalking center stage Sunday night, spitting his abstract, gnarled lyrics with sweaty intensity and a healthy dose of existential dread.
The lack of bodies in the room with Elucid feels like evidence of just how far ahead of the musical curve he has remained since appearing on the scene in the early ’00s. He’s long since given up on rhyme schemes and boogie-down beats. The sound of his work, either on solo albums like last year’s REVELATOR or as part of Armand Hammer, his duo with rapper billy woods, is about blunt-force statements and music that seems to be desiccating with every passing second.
He arranged the setlist to reflect his evolution, packing the first half with earlier cuts like “Hyssop,” a fire and brimstone explosion from 2018, and select cuts from his Armand Hammer albums. All of them had been sent through his dub sound system production skein, with the beats warping like taffy and crackling with noise.
The back half of the evening was primarily devoted to tracks from his most recent album, REVELATOR, on which he and his collaborators continued to strip everything down to the proverbial studs. “YOTTABYTE” and “ZIGZAGZIG” were piles of pink insulation with itchy imagery zapping at the skin like live wires, while more blunt edged, paranoid tunes like “IKEBANA” felt as if each line (“Cut a snake head, and they still bite/Why when I tell the truth, I be thinking who to invite?”) could draw blood if we got too close.