Yeah, this is late, but early-January reviews are meant for mea culpa records - albums that certain people should have gotten around to reviewing - but never did. There were early criticisms of Soft Money when it first dropped: “not experimental enough” (!) said the alternative media, “too weird” (!!) said the predictable hip hop press. That kind of can’t-please-nobody criticism should be reserved for records that actually suck. Directed at Soft Money, they do an injustice. Jel’s sophomore Anticon LP proudly struts the fine line between loudspeaker hardcore boom-bap and symphonic headphone candy and makes a revelatory mix of the two in the process.

    The Artist Legally Known As Jeff Logan has expanded his repertoire since Greenball, and the man known for his ability to put an Emu SP 1200 on his lap and program a beat like he was typing on a keyboard now fleshes out his compositions with an MPC, various laptop tools and some live instrumentation. But that doesn’t take the edge off of his work, and this critic has seen producers sit down and listen to Jel beats and play “Is it a break or is it programmed?” with a hit/miss ratio of about 50/50. The guy knows drums. He knows them well enough to almost overshadow the return of PRT’s Wise Intelligent on “WMD”, probably one of the most underrated songs of 2006. Logan’s hits swell and rattle your Ipod buds, while the Poor Righteous Teacher spits the benefits of his research, tracing Osama Bin Laden’s genealogy to Bush business associates, then calling out the music industry for de facto freedom of speech violations: “He’ll lose his job / If your DJ ever play this / And get dropped off his label if your MC dare to say this.”

    Play that song twice and then backtrack to “All Day Breakfast”, which is essentially the opposite of “WMD”. Here, Jel flies solo with unidentifiable soaring samples, epic drums, elegant keys, distorted hits and chords, massive cymbal crashes. It’s a truly beautiful piece of instrumental hip hop: sun-on-the-snow frigid and violent like a glacial avalanche. “Sweet Cream In It”, on the other hand, sees a wailing blues guitar spliced over drums chopped like a perpetual four-armed jazz percussionist’s drum solo. “Mislead” shifts gears again, abstracting melody from atonal synth samples densely layered on top of each other over stuttering, shape-changing drums and distorted clacks that somehow end up sounding like congas. If you see a theme emerging, you’re probably right: Jel does everything possible to stay away from the number one killer of all instrumental hip hop records - monotony. And he succeeds admirably simply by refusing to settle into stock-sounds and overused loops. Or Chris Martin soundalikes and trendy Hyphy MC’s, if you prefer that comparison. (Ouch. – Editor)

   In fact, if there’s a complaint to be had about Soft Money, it’s due solely to “No Solution”, which delves a little too far into the smooth sounds of Gap-shopping, and is an obvious misfit in the tracklist for it. Instrumental hip hop records are inherently limited, but that’s what makes a disc like Soft Money such a standout. Jel takes the genre’s standard song structure (bass goes here, glitchy part here, horn or string loops fade out before the bridge at which point the DJ cuts in a Guru quote to avoid the appearance of nerdy laptopper, and the whole thing repeats again to fade-out) and flips it on its head. You want some stimulating beats to write to?