13 and God is a collaboration between kraut-pop-electronic group The Notwist and underground hip hoppers Themselves recorded in Germany. This sort of collaboration is rare but not exactly new, you could count Unkle's Psyence Fiction, To Rococo Rot's Music is a Hungry Ghost, and even Gorillaz as similar creations. Interestingly, of the three, the Unkle album is the only one that is hip hop first, flavored by pop music, and 13 and God continues that trend as this album is essentially 3/4s a Notwist album with a few rap tracks and extra twists added in.
Those extra twists can be both good and bad. Do we really need Super Smash TV and Speak-N-Spell samples in a Notwist song? Do we really need odd movie dialogue samples? These have become turntablism cliches, and The Notwist has their own group of glitch pop cliches to worry about. The use of these samples both hits ("big money, big prices, I love it" is kinda awesome) and misses (the movie samples are kinda superfluous in "Low Heaven" and filler track "Walk"); ultimately I feel the album would be better without them.
The best songs are the ones that sound most like The Notwist. On "Men of Station," the echoy beat, keyboard melody, and drowsy vocals are dreamy and beautiful. Themselves add an odd-voiced chorus, but otherwise there's little hint of their contribution. Similarly, "Perfect Speed" uses little from Themselves, focusing on a great fuzzed-out guitar sound, fluctuating droney keyboard tones, and a simple, reserved beat.
Part of the fun of glitch pop is the freedom to use any beat and layers and layers of beats, so what Themselves have to add other than rapping is in question. There's no real scratching and few turntable sounds. The beats of "Soft Atlas" and "Superman on Ice" are clearly hip hop, but they're rather rudimentary hip hop beats. They're great rhymes, but once Doseone starts flowing, there's not much room for The Notwist. "Superman on Ice" has a long intro, with pretty, sweeping strings and a great bassline, but all that drops out when the rappers start rapping.
Album opener "Low Heaven" is perhaps the only song where the parts fit, instead of just showcasing the parts separately. The hip hop beat and fast-paced rapping mix quite well with the gentle saxophone tones and more deliberately-paced keyboard melody. Doseone and Markus Acher alternate lines in the chorus of "pray to my lucky stars," creating a further feeling of symbiosis of styles.
I was going to base this review on the pun "The Notwist must think too highly of Themselves," but the more I listened to the album, the less it applied. Granted the best moments here are the moments that sound most like The Notwist, but the rap tracks are good as well. Where the album suffers in comparison to Unkle or To Rococo Rot is cohesiveness. This album seems more like a collection, some songs started by The Notwist with Themselves adding a little bit and some songs started by Themselves with The Notwist adding a little bit... which makes sense considering this collaboration started by mail before the recording date. If you're a fan of either or both of those groups, it's highly recommended, but it doesn't really transcend that. Perhaps if all songs were like "Low Heaven," the album would be more noteworthy.
