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Full-length debut by Baltimore area group comes at hip-hop from an oblique angle, with the rapping holding down the rhythmic pulse while producer Ricky Rabbit's noisy and diverse beats fly all over the place.

Food for Animals come at hip-hop from an oblique angle. Or, to put it less gently, they do it ass-backwards, inverting the traditional roles of beats and rhymes. MCs Vulture Voltaire (aka Andrew Field-Pickering) and Hy (aka Sterling Warren) hold down the rhythmic pulse with their flows, while the beats-- well, the beats just fly all over the fucking place. Producer Ricky Rabbit's loops sound like a Stan Brakhage Nintendo game-- P.A.-pulverizing fits of chopped and screwed digital squalor that mash up lo-bit Pita-style electronics with breakcore, Baltimore club, dubstep, and techno. But the topsy-turvy ethos and gurgling electronics hardly make Belly-- the group's first full-length-- a headache-inducing mess. Rather, Belly is a giant step forward for the trio in just about every regard. The hooks are stronger, the verses are tighter, the noise is, well, better.

In 2004 Food for Animals were loud and messy. Rickey Rabbit used to perform live by routing his iTunes into a smorgasbord of pedals while Vulture rapped through a delay and a now absent guitarist plucked out circuit-bent Atari sounds. They produced a formidable speaker-cone-busting racket, which-- more often than not-- soundsystems weren't quite up to. Likewise the Scavengers EP-- the group's overlooked first release-- was structurally loose and sonically raw. Ricky Rabbit regularly made use of frequencies so severe that it often felt like your hearing was shutting on and off in time to the music.

On Belly, Food for Animals haven't gone smooth-- the record is still loud enough to shorten the lifespan of your high-range hearing-- but they have tightened up. "Shhhy"'s shattered synth-loop bursts from of a cloud of murmurs and chopped piano samples, with Vulture's rapping anchored by coarse bass thuds. But the tight chorus-- with its layered vocal samples and psyched-out chipmunk octave chant-- is where "Shhhy" will make you lose it like a 14-year-old at a Rage Against the Machine show. "Yeah my generation got clowned and still my surroundings can't even make a sound," raps Vulture. "You look at me nervous with your finger on your mouth-- but you don't have to be so shy."

Vulture's lyrics have also come up a notch since Scavengers. Where old songs might have found the imposing 6-foot-plus beardo rapping about "elephants humpin' in your trunk," on Belly he delivers tighter and deeper rhymes about everything from hot days spent with Arthur Russell records to his mother's untimely death. "Every time I hear the word cancer I need a cigarette/ I'm not sure I get it yet," he raps in a poignant moment on the unexpectedly heavy album closer "Grapes". The arrival of Hy also adds a little more flavor to the proceedings by giving the songs the fuel of another personality.

But it's producer Ricky Rabbit who really pushes Belly's game forward. Despite Vulture and Hy's ample charisma, without the upside-down rhythm, skull scraping buzzes, and stereo-bong samples, Belly might struggle to stand out at a Takoma Park open-mic night. Instrumentals like the gentle and trippy synth-blips of "Grapes (Preprise)" or "Virgogo"-- a slanted pass at Baltimore Club-- show off his talent for taking the navel-gazing sounds of digital minimalism and making them bounce.

Belly may be a weird and noisy hip-hop album, but it's still a hip-hop album, and by that measure it's more 3 Feet High and Rising than Death Certificate. Food for Animals bring the noise, but they don't want to bludgeon you with it. On Belly, they drop some incomprehensible beats, make sounds that recall a box of light bulbs rolling down a flight of stairs, and put down some pretty heavy lyrics-- the name is after all a reference to the belly of the beast, to being pulverized and digested-- but it's not a some head-grinding avant-deathtrip. "I get nice and fuzzy with my buddies cause they funny and I love y'all/ We chuckling and coughing and laugh for no reason while we talkin'," raps Vulture on "Swampy (Summer Jam)", a song that's as much about healing as it is about murky underpants. Belly may be all about getting turned upside down and inside out, but when it's over, all that tumult will leave you feeling pretty good.

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