Shopping Carts Crashing

Shopping Carts Crashing, the first Japanese-only original rap album, was the usual for Antipop Consortium, an appealingly skewed collection of productions. If these tracks barely come together on a first listen, they make more sense after a few times through, either dense ("Starring Me as Me") or skeletal ("M"), but always imaginatively obtuse. The trio gets in some good rhymes while indulging in baffling mayhem -- whether it's quoting from The Mary Tyler Moore Show theme (with their raps, no less) or sampling an opera singer.