Chapter 11, Venom, was one of my favourites to write, CAS bangs. If you don’t know, get to know.
It was the final show of a short European tour supporting his new album, ‘Famous Last Words’, and a near sell-out crowd was lapping up the newest, old hero of UK rap. This meant a few old favourites like ‘All Hallows’, a wicked wordplay of Britishness, where Cas raps about celebrity chefs (he holds a long-running fixation for Nigella Lawson), alongside newbies like ‘Venom’ and ‘Traction Control,’ continuing the record's synth-heavy '80s sci-fi futurism aesthetic. “I just jumped out the morgue, ain't nobody fresher / Only MC on my level, M.C. Escher,” Cas spits, acknowledging the Dutch graphic artist known for his mind-bending optical illusions and mathematically inspired art, paintings of dizzying landscapes of impossible staircases.
Cas makes intensely visual music. Look through some of his music videos, which he is closely involved in creating, and his eerie vision of retro-futurism will soon coerce you. Yet it’s Hieronymus Bosch, another Dutch artist, that Cas’ music reminds me of, which Walter Gibson describes as, “A world of dreams [and] nightmares in which forms seem to flicker and change before our eyes.” Cas is the drug-addicted dealer, the “psychologist's wet dream” who falls in love with the prostitute, pacing pavements, stomping the dirty, seedy streets of North London sometime between night and day, after the after party, wraps in his back pocket, the coke drip stinging the back of your throat, “Bowie banging in the tape.”
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