#425 Das Racist - Relax

Really still love Sit Down, Man, kinda liked Shut Up, Dude, gotta check out the new one.

On one hand, this has a lot to like. The rhymes are still complex and clever, and their previously straightforward approach to production has evolved to become a adventurous, wooly beast, with odd sounds, odd structures, plenty of noisy flailing and aggressive annoyingness. It sounds not a little like newer Spank Rock, full of neon and mirror ball glinting. It's exciting.

That said, it's just not that much fun. On Shut Up, Dude, the dudes sounded like rappers doing their thing. On the follow-up, they seemed giddy with the possibilities of their newfound success, tweaking expectations and frolicking in the fringes of rap, race, nostalgia, and anything else that flit through their minds, moving at blazing speeds. But now they seem to be trying to live up to something, not content to revel, they seem to need to engage and justify, to react instead of provoking reactions. The rapping comes across as alternately confrontational or aggressively disinterested, flaunting their ability to do whatever they want, instead of just doing whatever they want.

Sit Down, Man was a grower for me. Das Racists' rhymes can take a few passes to decipher, and are much more fun once they've worn grooves in your mind. There's a lot of promise here, with new sounds and angles around every corner, but it didn't make me smile. I like to smile!

On some level, Das Racist can't win. What else should they have done here? And if this was another group's debut, it would be a stunner. These guys, more than any band I can think of, engage with expectations, a double edged sword that splits us to around 4/5

Edit Jan 5th 2012: on further listening, this is almost certainly a brilliant album, full of weird production and structures and other things I love, shackled by the carefree blush of its predecesor, its probably at least a half a point higher

You might like this if: you like weird production, weird rapping, cleverness, and obnoxiousness, glittering sickly slickly.