Music: No Bird Sing releases angry, intellectual 'Theft of the Commons'

The year 2009 was a good one for hip-hop trio No Bird Sing. After rapidly gaining local clout with a well received eponymous debut, the group was named one of First Avenue's Best New Bands. But with its brand-new "Theft of the Commons," No Bird Sing -- MC Joe Horton, guitarist Robert Mulrennan and drummer Graham O'Brien -- makes a conscious move away from its early sound to a vastly harder-edged effort.

Recorded in a barn with live takes and boasting zero samples, "Theft of the Commons" is a scorched-earth affair. "We were burning the bridge as we were crossing it," Horton, 28, said over beers at the Muddy Pig in St. Paul. Minor glitches and hiccups were purposefully left on the tracks. "I don't want the record to be a castrated version of the live show," he said.

The LP is a genre-bender, blurring the lines between aggressive rock and conscious hip-hop, with Horton's brooding flow at war with consumerism and sociopolitical power dynamics. "This record came from me being really frustrated with the way we organize ourselves as human beings," Horton said, name-checking lefty thinkers Howard Zinn and Noam Chomsky as influences.

There's a smirking take on a capitalist's version of heaven on the guitar-marching "Afterlife Insurance," an apocalyptic approach to cultural apathy on the Heiruspecs-ish "Outcasted" and a postmodernist lament on the dark, piano-tinged "River Blue Truth." Horton hopes all that lyrical weightiness will lend staying power to the album. Think Aesop Rock's arty allegory backed by a rock band and channeled through Chomsky's "Manufacturing Consent."

If the dense philosophizing and genre-hopping stick out on "Theft," Horton is quick to defer some credit to celebrated St. Paul rapper Eyedea, who died last year of an accidental overdose. Horton says his friend Larsen helped him develop as a rapper and as a thinker.

"Those three years [of friendship] were a crash-course in freestyling," he said, calling Larsen one of the best freestyle rappers ever. Horton also credits Larsen with sparking his interest in philosophy and quantum physics. The friends would routinely stay up until 7 a.m., pontificating on the works of Niels Bohr and Fritjof Capra. When Larsen died, Horton says, he lost not only a great friend, but a teacher and a safety net. "Not only did he mean a lot to me as an MC and a person, he helped me be OK being myself."

With "Theft of the Commons," Horton has dedicated a record to Larsen he believes in. "I feel really good about it; I feel Pitchfork good," he said. "I feel if Pitchfork heard it, we'd get a 7 or above."