Doomtree does things their way

PHOTO by BO HAKALA

After seven years of being a collective/rap group/business/record label, you would think Doomtree would at least be on their third or fourth album by now, but they’re just about to release their first. Doomtree MC, producer and Rhymesayers signee P.O.S. says it’s for the best. First, when Doomtree was founded, MCs Sims and Dessa weren’t in the band. Second, he says their sound back then would have been too rough: “It gets more and more refined as it comes out,” he says. “We find what errors we want to work on, and we fix them.” Most importantly, waiting this long let Doomtree record, produce and release on their own terms: “It could’ve happened last year,” says P.O.S., “but we decided to do this on our own.”

Actually, they’ve done almost everything on their own (Dessa raps “We rock the D.I.Y. ethic because the rest don’t ever D.I. at all” in “Flex”). In the years leading up to their debut—set to be released on the 29th—Doomtree firmly established themselves as a source for some of Minneapolis’ most inspired hip-hop. It began slowly, around the beginning of the new millennium, with a bedroom recording project between P.O.S. and DJ/producer Marshall Larada, first making beats and later adding rhymes to them and later adding more and more MCs and producers and even getting a house—the famed Doomtree Mansion (a Victorian house situated in uptown Minneapolis), which is still around today. The number of participants in Doomtree now hovers around nine—apart from the aforementioned four, it also includes MCs Mike Mictian, Cecil Otter, and producers Paper Tiger, Turbo Nemesis, and Lazerbeak (who doubles as Plastic Constellations’ guitarist).

Doomtree get a lot of attention for being occasionally political but they keep the lyrics more artfully restrained than loudly explicit—less Immortal Technique, more Buffalo Springfield. At the end of “Savion Glover,” off the collective’s formidable 2007 False Hopes B-side compilation, P.O.S. quotes Fugazi’s refrain from “Five Corporations” (“This one’s ours, let’s take another”) over and over: “This one’s ours, let’s take another/ This one’s ours, let’s take another/This one’s ours, let’s take another/and then the dance away clean like Savion Glover.” Says P.O.S.: “I mean, you know that there’s too much at stake at this election. I feel like this past year, a lot of people I know are halfway packed to get out of this country unless something really good happens.”

Dessa described their lyrics best in a public radio interview: It’s broken hip-hop. “If you listen to our lyrics, that’s probably self-evident,” she said. “Most people talk about a broken political system, or broken hearts or broken heads.” And if False Hopes—comprising collaborative and solo tracks from the collective—is the result of Doomtree’s leftovers, the promise of a meticulously constructed and designed debut means their future is intensely bright, an enormous payoff that was hundreds of shows, songs and late-night planning sessions in the making.

DOOMTREE WITH CROWN CITY ROCKERS, FLOBOTS AND P.O.S. HOUSE OF BLUES | 1530 S DISNEYLAND DR | ANAHEIM 92802 | HOB.COM | FRI | $12.50 | ALL AGES | 16 AND UNDER MUST BE ACCOMPANIED BY ADULT

Tags: anaheim, doomtree, hip hop, house of blues, Music