Ephelant and Time's 'How To Sew Wounds With Words' Is an Anarchist Hip-Hop Rallying Cry

When someone opens an email with "NO GODS NO MASTERS," you probably sit up and pay attention—or at least I do. Despite the fact that I seldom (i.e. never) cover hip-hop here, when a self-described anarchist hip-hop group cold-emailed me yesterday, I pressed play with some trepidation but discovered that I liked what I was hearing. What Ephelant and Time are doing reminds me of a more confrontational Sage Francis, or a less aggro Dalek; admittedly, my frame of reference for this kind of music is slim, but their brand of dark, emotional, slithery hip-hop is the only kind that's ever appealed to me, and that's exactly what this duo's got on offer.

Producer Ephelant (a.k.a. actor Stephen Vining, who you've seen lurching for flesh as a zombie on The Walkiing Dead) keeps his beats light and airy, melodic and bright, making plenty of space for Time (a.k.a journalist Chris Steele) to spin his tales of predatory real estate developers, vampiric banks, poisonous patriarchy, Bolshevik ghosts, and the soul-sucking pursuit of capital. The "anarchist" tag is no joke—the duo's politics imbue every syllable, every sentence pointed and poetic. Written like diary entries, the tracks on How To Sew Wounds With Words makes the political feel terribly personal, whether it's "Foreclosed Ghost Story" conjuring dispossessed spirits and homeless children or "2:15AM" acting as an apocalyptic cry for help—"Barbarians, blood and murder gets you medals / Depleted uranium in the lungs, he loves me not she picks the petal / White phosphorus in the lungs, he loves me not she picks the petal."

Out August 1, How To Sew Wounds With Words will be released via Dirty Laboratory Productions and come graced by cover art from political comic book artist Seth Tobocman (War in the Neighborhood, World War 3, Disaster and Resistance). You can read the lyrics here, and stream the whole album below.

Steal some time on the clock to listen.

"Anti-union, so they divide and conquer
It's all about profit, alienation's the monster
I dipped this verse in kerosene, won't you help me light it?
Best part about it I stole time on the clock to write this."

Kim Kelly is smelling drugstore perfume on Twitter.