★★★★★
To understand South African rave/rap trio Die Antwoord and their sophomore LP TEN$ION is to know the underlying counter-culture philosophy of Zef. What is Zef, you ask? Die Antwoord's diminutive and spookily androgynous lady rapper Yo-Landi Vi$$er described it best, associating it with "people who soup their cars up and rock gold and shit...
- www.beat.com.au
2012-03-07
★★★★★
Ten$ion is not a bad name for a Die Antwoord album. The appeal of the Cape Town hip-hop duo (trio if you count their perpetually identity-shifting beatmaker DJ Hi-Tek) has stemmed from a sort of cultural dissonance, a subversive slant that the internet intelligentsia quickly couched in terms of "performance art" or even Dada. This particular tension boils down to a question of "realness" vs...
- www.tinymixtapes.com
2012-03-06
★★★★★
Apparently, we are in the midst of recession. High street stores are closing by the dozen, yet people are buying overpriced headphones. Perhaps it's an urban disease, but the number of Dr Dre's Beats headphones adorning the skulls of the morning commuter and late teen risers is definitely on the rise...
- www.musicomh.com
2012-02-27
★★★★★
Comedy rap act or conceptual art project? Whatever your opinion on rave-rappers Die Antwoord, their new album is a rare treat - South African pop music. But if a cultural insight into the country is intriguing enough, Ten$ion's depiction of modern South Africa is nothing less than thrilling. Though not explicitly, nor necessarily the intentions of its creators, it's hard to shake the image of a future dystopia. Somehow, Ten$ion is sci-fi. How? Well, it's the result of many things...
- thequietus.com
2012-02-27
★★★★★
Once again, lets give a warm welcome to Ninja, the meth-head Situation, and his zombie-Gelfling homeslice, Yo-Landi Vi$$er! After a brief Cape Town hiatus spent avoiding nutrition, wearing adult Underoos, and fokken around wif homies, the ugly faces of South Africas rap-rave crew Die Antwoord have returned to present their second Stateside full-length, which theyve promoted, poker-faces intact, as having "much higher" "gangster levels" than $O$, their zany 2010 debut...
- www.spin.com
2012-02-23
★★★★★
Die Antwoord TEN$ION (Zef/Downtown/Co-Op) Is "pastiche" an insult in the 21st century? Emerging in the age of Girl Talk's delirious fusions and the internet's pop-culture free-for-all, South African trio Die Antwoord are very much a pastiche: punk in spirit, rap in sound, pop in sheer instantaneousness...
- www.thevine.com.au
2012-02-13
★★★★★
What do you do when the joke's over? In the case of South African satirical rap group/shock artists/walking internet memes/"zef" pioneers the only way to go is the really (really) weird. Witness the video to Ten$ion's lead single (and grammar/spell check nightmare) I Fink U Freeky, a hideous, yet oddly exciting, melange of writhing beds of rats, deformities and children in blackface and elephant masks...
- www.noripcord.com
2012-02-09
★★★★★
I have to confess that until recently, I had no idea what a Die Antwoord was. But I learned. Oh, how I learned. I learned about them via YouTube, and I learned about them from message boards. I heard endless discussions of Ninja's flow and Yo-Landi's grating high-pitched whine. And here's the thing: I can't make up my mind about them. I don't love them, and I don't really even "like" them that much, but I can't stop listening to this record, at least for this hour or two...
- www.popmatters.com
2012-02-09