Calling Blood Of Abraham's career path "singular" would be an understatement. The group first rose to notoriety when Eazy E signed it to his influential Ruthless Records. The endearingly P.T. Barnum-esque Ruthless boss no doubt dug the novelty and incongruity of a pair of white Orthodox Jews recording for a Jheri-Curl-dripping, drug-slinging gangsta-rap legend, but the duo's 1994 Ruthless debut, Future Profits, failed to rack up 3rd Bass-level sales, let alone Beastie Boys numbers. Ruthless imploded after E's death, so Blood Of Abraham leaped from one sinking ship to another when it signed with much-buzzed-about, web-friendly fleeting sensation Atomic Pop, which quickly folded along with the rest of its e-peers, taking Blood Of Abraham's superb follow-up, EyeDollarTree, down with it.
Now, half a decade after its aborted release, EyeDollarTree is finally hitting shelves, along with a bonus DVD containing an accompanying short film. It holds up surprisingly well, as the dystopian future it predicts has become the queasy present, lending the album a distinctly prescient feel. The first track, "Know The Half," establishes the trippy, genre-hopping mood, opening with discordant noise and Old Testament rambling before sliding lazily into a shambling groove that sounds like the last country song being played on a transistor radio in a barren desert wasteland. "Calling All Citizens," meanwhile, finds Blood Of Abraham rattling off societal ills over a Technicolor backdrop of swinging bass and groovy keys, crafting funky space-age bachelor-pad music for a post-apocalyptic hellscape.
Like the rest of the album, that track surveys a bleak world riddled with disease, warped values, corruption, and constant surveillance, but not without a sturdy sense of humor and a winning pop-art playfulness. Blood Of Abraham might look at the sad state of contemporary culture with horror and disdain, but anarchy and disorder have always been the natural allies of great music. EyeDollarTree may be about the end of the world as we know it, but it's feeling strangely fine about society's strange decline. A famous curse runs, "May you live in interesting times." Whether in 2000 or 2005, EyeDollarTree provides the rollicking soundtrack to some supremely interesting times.