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There was a time in Elder's career where you could accurately refer to them as a doom metal band, but at this point they're really just a progressive/psychedelic rock band, and on Omens they prove to be an increasingly great one. It's pretty damn impressive for something he quickly put together at home, and if these are songs that aren't making his new album, I can't wait to hear what does. As ever, Smino tends to favor warm, jazz/soul-inspired production ("O'HighO" makes especially good use of psychedelic soul), and his delivery tends to hop seamlessly between rapping and singing or fuses the two entirely. AINT NUN PERFECT ALL UNMASTERED N ROUGH RAW WTF EVER for y'all." It's also got some songs that wouldn't be on a proper album like freestyles over Roddy Ricch's "The Box," Megan Thee Stallion's "Savage," and Baby Keem's "Orange Soda" and a remix of Noir standout "Klink" by veteran crooner T-Pain (who Smino toured with in 2017) but there's also a lot of genuinely great songs on this thing. The line between "mixtape" and "album" is pretty blurry these days, but She Already Decided really feels like a mixtape. "I made dis sh*t at the krib fr tryna stay sane and inspired as much as I can mane," he said. Midwest rapper Smino has been working on a followup to his great 2018 album Noir, which he seemed to imply is on pause due to coronavirus, but in the meantime he released this 16-song mixtape that he made while self-isolating at home. I'll admit I had my doubts, given how long it's been since they made music, but I guess sometimes it just takes writing the right songs to get the wheels turning for a comeback, and these were definitely the right songs. The recording quality is as modest as it was on Los Angeles, and the band really sound fired-up on this record. There's no mistaking Exene Cervenka/John Doe harmonies for any other band, and it's really not everyday that you hear a four-decade-old punk band making new music that captures the spirit of their classic material like this. X's classic debut album Los Angeles turns 40 this weekend, and the band would be playing an anniversary show in LA if you-know-what didn't happen, but instead, the punk legends surprise-released this album, which is their first in 27 years and first with the original lineup in 35 years! It includes last year's "Delta 88 Nightmare" / "Cyrano de Berger’s Back" single, which were both songs X wrote back in the day but recorded recently ("Delta 88 Nightmare" dates all the way back to the Los Angeles sessions), but the other nine songs were all newly-written and those songs sound like classic X too. The guests don't just show up, spit their verse, and leave - more often than not, you're hearing a group of voices swirl together, making for an ambitious, genre-defying album that really goes beyond the standard barriers of rap music. He's often the star of the show, but he's also a good team player, and one of the best parts of this album is how communal it sounds. And Quelle Chris is an increasingly commanding rapper, who sounds even more effortlessly great than he did five years ago. Chris Keys' warm, jazz-inspired production sounds as lively as walking into a jazz club, and that's at least partially because Chris played and recorded the instruments himself. The new album also sounds bigger and brighter than the first one.
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Almost every guest from the first Innocent Country is on this new one too (Cavalier, Denmark Vessey, Big Sen, Fresh Daily), but this time the duo also roped in some exciting bigger names like Earl Sweatshirt, Tune-Yards' Merrill Garbus, and Homeboy Sandman, as well as some other underground rap figures who are having a moment right now like Pink Siifu and Billy Woods. He's put out at least one project a year for quite some time now (his latest was 2019's very solid Guns), and 2020 brings Innocent Country 2 with producer Chris Keys, the sequel to the duo's 2015 album Innocent Country. Quelle Chris remains one of underground rap's most prolific and consistently great voices.