Friday, December 16, 2011

Album of the Day: Kool Keith - Black Elvis/Lost in Space


Imagine this: take Deltron 3030, get rid of the overarching story, and have several beers. That's what you get here. Kool Keith is weird as shit. Not as off-the-wall crazy as in Dr. Octagonecologist, but not far off. ('Metric bypass computes on overload retrace 'cause we're lost in space,' what does that even mean?) It seems to me that perhaps all of the lyrics mean something, but a lot of the time they're more complicated than I'm expecting, especially in comparison to other more straightforward rhymes placed immediately next to them, so they fly over my head (“I could throw a hundred thousand pound walrus right through the wall, that's right, mad like five gorillas in a vocal booth”). Half of the album is the “Lost in Space” section, full of space references, weird futuristic (for 1999) synth beats, and of course a plethora of overt sexual references, while the second half is the “Black Elvis” section, with (slightly) more traditional beats and verses based more around women and music. I listened to 'Dr. Octagonecologist' long before I heard this one, so a lot of my impressions are reinforced by what I heard there, and this album certainly doesn't disappoint in that regard. Despite all of the legitimate weirdness and eccentricity that is pervasive in every single song, I found the album as a whole to surprisingly, and disappointingly, average. It feels like there is something missing, that one element that would elevate it from relatively banal to vibrant and strange, as it attempts to be.

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