I understand the love for El-P’s solo material, but I doubt he’ll ever top the work he did on Funcrusher Plus. You can hear the premillenial paranoia peeling off every lo-fi track on this album like rotting wallpaper in a dingy flat. The beats are sparse and primitive, the lyrics dense and the whole sound is unapologetically experimental, but not in a contrived way. You’d be hard-pressed to find a single good-time party jam in the bunch (the closest being the nostalgic tagging ode “Lune TNS”.) If you’re willing to go deep down the well, the masterpiece of the album has to be the teeth-rattling “Last Good Sleep”, in which El-P catalogs his childhood memories of his stepfather abusing his mother. The vocals are so tightly-wound that it’s nearly impossible at times to unpack the meanings—a song like “Population Control” may be referring to a dystopian future, wack MC’s, or all of the above. But ten years on, we’re living in the future of advanced multinational corporate synergy where “Bill Gates and Ted Turner rub each other down in olive oil” that El-P foresaw in ’97, and the album sounds just as relevant, unrelenting and unforgiving now as it did then.