Anti-pop Consortium Album Review and Live Footage (Time Out NY)

Time Out NY Album review:
Anti-Pop Consortium
Fluorescent Black (Big Dada)

Like Jay-Z, Anti-Pop Consortium released its “farewell” album in 2003. But only now, on the heels of the superstar’s third postretirement full-length, is this esteemed alt-hip-hop collective staging a studio comeback. Fluorescent Black is so hyperinvolved, it’s hard to begrudge the delay. If the disc doesn’t match the glitchy splendor of APC’s 2002 landmark, Arrhythmia, it still attains euphoric sensory overload on tracks like “Get Lite,” in which wobbly synths command as much attention as syllable-crammed verses. During “Apparently,” “End Game” and other standouts, rhymes fuse cyborglike with high-tech beats, yielding a bracingly weird underground response to The Blueprint 3’s glitzy arena rap.—Hank Shteamer

Anti-Pop Consortium plays Santos Party House Tue 29.