cata9tales is: Berkley Priest (vocals) and Kreator (Kenny Perkins) (beats), and they’re from Baltimore and Virginia and are currently based in Baltimore.
Hello Maybe Everything is their most recent record. It is an extraordinary, visceral, aggressive torrent of words and pop-cultural references. My first thought on listening to it was, no lie, “these dudes are going to keep the people at Rap Genius in business all by themselves.”
For example, in their first song, things they mash together include but are not limited to: Guns n’ Roses, Jay-Z, Wizard of Oz, Jungle Book, the Bible and Valley of the Dolls:
There is also Children of the Cloud, which is a complex riff on modern living and the weird things internet culture / living on internet time does to our brains that starts with a Dorothy Parker quote and then – in just the first verse – slaloms through two centuries worth of the concept of “frontier” before hitting a crescendo with All around the Starfleet they coming out their carseats which I’m pretty sure sums up both the connections and the yawning cultural chasm between those present for the birth of the web and those who have been on the web since birth in, like, nine words.
Though my favorite line is probably So you got a broken heart? Well there’s an app for that.
And then there is A Conspiracy of Ravens, featuring Brad Bass, Crafsmen, Cream De La “The Tenman” which is just Baltimore: raw, beautiful, brutal, and capable of being home to Edgar Allen Poe and Omar Little.