Audiopile Review: The posthumous album by Paten Locke, 2022’s Americancer, was a thoroughly rinsed shop fave that revealed a visionary voice in underground hip-hop, one that was taken from us far too soon. Recorded at the same time as Americancer (released in ’22 but recorded back in 2017), Locke gifts us another album from the great beyond, the cheekily titled Dance On My Grave. And rather than feel like a set of tracks not up to snuff for inclusion on its predecessor, Dance On My Grave works more like a companion piece, drawing on a similar palette of samples culled from crackled psych rock and untraceable dollar bin LPs. And his relationship with Edan can once again be felt throughout too. The two Boston-based MCs/producers had worked together live and in the studio over the years, and Edan’s unique home-fi psychedelia production, bursting with references to hip-hop’s past, can be heard across both Americancer and Dance On My Grave, though Locke lifts the lysergic collage style to dizzying new heights with an even more intense barrage of samples. While the album was created after he had been diagnosed with stage 4 lung cancer, Locke remains defiant in the face of definitive death, unleashing an incessant flow that’s cleverly boastful, funny and, above all, defiant. Dance On My Grave is as uplifting and inspiring as it is inventive, and it may be the final work we hear from one of the underground’s most unsung talents of the last two decades.

***

The companion album to ‘Americancer’ (2022).

Originally conceived, written, produced, and recorded by Paten himself in the mid 2010’s, the rough collection of experimental/lo-fi-/underground/psychedelic rock & hip hop songs that would eventually become Americancer and Dance on My Grave were more or less finalized in 2017. Yes, Paten prophetically named his magnum opus a full 2 years before he was diagnosed with stage-4 cancer and was swiftly taken from us. It’s almost as if his soul knew before his body did…and before he departed, he left us these instructions: