don’t know where to start, so I’ll just say this first: man, did I ever miss the boat on Cex’s Tall, Dark, And Handcuffed. My review acknowledged its flaws but didn’t speak to what a bipolar mess the record was. Cex, or Rjyan Kidwell, described his early IDM recordings as “practice”, but that was warm-up; it’s really Handcuffed that saw him testing his abilities, and his confidence belied his confusion. He tried to speak to his inner demons, but that’s something that’s hard to take seriously when sandwiched between two lightweight party tracks. Mostly, I think I was drawn to the album’s cracks, the places where Kidwell wanted to scream but felt too bound by his character. He showed that he had the tenacity to make powerful, scarred music, but he didn’t let it show. Alluding to the album’s title, Kidwell had handcuffed himself and swallowed the key. He still doesn’t break free on Being Ridden, but he struggles to within an inch of his life, and makes the best album of his short career in the process.


Rjyan Kidwell has never been a by-the-books entity in underground music, partly because of his frantic live hip-hop sets (that often take place in the crowd), but also because he ties his music so closely to his life via his diary-like website. With previous efforts this has seemed like an afterthought, but with Being Ridden it’s a key element to understanding the music. Kidwell’s zest for his life and his community in Baltimore was apparent in nearly every interview he did during his IDM album phase, so it was a surprise for many to see him move to Oakland, California, abandoning everything he identified himself with-- including his longtime girlfriend. Late-night musings on his site saw him grappling with his former confidence and asking pivotal questions to himself. It was both arresting and uncomfortable to read, but only upped the ante for the music on the much-discussed Being Ridden album.


You can hear this darkness and confusion all over the finalized Being Ridden both in Kidwell’s words and in his music, which is now informed by The Microphones and Nine Inch Nails as much as Hrvatski and Autechre. The shift is immediately evident in the claustrophobic opener, “The Wayback Machine”. Starting off with a terse blend that mixes insistent glitches and beeps with a wayward acoustic guitar that just keeps spiraling up into nothing, the song is the first concrete evidence of Cex’s vision coming into focus. When the glitches blow up in a rhythmic haze of static, engulfing everything but the heartbeat beep, it sounds like the musical equivalent of throwing your hands up in the air in a motion of resignation. “You Kiss Like You’re Dead” follows up with Kidwell’s twisted version of a pop song, with multi-tracked vocals and a looming trapeze-like beat. A furiously strummed middle section even recalls Bright Eyes, which is an apt comparison, lyrically, and one which carries unwanted connotations with it. And this is where it gets sticky. It now becomes easy to write the album off as strained emo disguised as brainy musical manipulation, but I think that’s a shortsighted interpretation. Indeed, there are times when it sounds like Kidwell is cribbing from Makeoutclub.com, but in his shaky hands, it doesn’t feel like maudlin venting as much as the beginnings of a deeper purging. It’s when seen through this viewpoint that the album hits hardest.


Amid quietly taut instrumental excursions like “Other Countries”, with its eerie field recording and “See Ya Never, Sike” (which plays like an outtake from the Books’ 2002 Thought For Food), lie even more striking experiments like the simply stunning “Signal Katied”. Although it stands as the most estranged song on the album, it channels Kidwell’s concurrent quest for stretching his musical palette and conveying his headspace with the most gusto. After a short Tropicalian intro that calls to mind the Beastie Boys’ Hello Nasty, the song segues into pure Cex territory with multiple vocals ricocheting between the speakers and sputtering drums throwing echo everywhere. A chant and snap breakdown overcomes the music before it all congeals into a paranoid mess with Kidwell chanting “I’m never sleeping again”. At under two minutes, it resonates with the unmistakable sound of a struggling artist nailing it, and it couldn’t be more exciting.


Elsewhere, it’s a mixed bag. “Stamina” is his best straight hip-hop track to date, and comes out sinister enough to not disrupt the admittedly disjointed flow the album has. On the other hand, “Earth-Shaking Event,” whose lyrics are more strained than anything on Handcuffed warrants no appearance here. “The Marriage,” Kidwell’s first foray into story-based songwriting, works out incredibly well, exposing his flourishing lyrical talent in its most candid form. Its flower petal-eating imagery and confessional whispers rank among the most disarming moments on the record.


“Cex at Arm’s Length”, “Brer Rjyan”, and “Dead Bodies”, all three abetted by Shudder To Think’s Craig Wedren, comprise a trilogy that not only finds Kidwell at his bleakest, but sees the music begin to slowly collapse on itself with impossibly dense tracks that bear down on him like his own abandoned expectations. Being Ridden is not a great album, because these kinds rarely are. Kidwell’s vision is born of confusion and disarray, so it’s only natural that his art would follow suit. Being Ridden obtains its strengths because of its weaknesses, both Kidwell’s and his music’s. And he knows this. But when he finds a way to howl into the void that is this captivating, and do so while expanding his sonic vocabulary, it can’t be written off any longer. This is where you start listening to what Rjyan Kidwell has to say.