Awol One & Daddy Kev

Awol One, Daddy Kev and D-Styles return with their third collaboration in two years. Slanguage is a welcome 180-degree psychedelic spin into classical, jazz, and opera, to create beats that most often deserve to be instrumentals. Daddy Kev has neatly weaved one constantly changing composition that is almost arbitrarily separated into tracks and given song titles that couldn’t be stranger if they were written by the Invisibl Skratch Picklz. Speaking of which, Slanguage could use more D-Styles and less Awolrus. D-Styles’ cuts bring out the sounds of Daddy Kev’s inventive production, while Awol spends much of his mic time rambling nonsense on songs like "Six Black Roses Are Sent to Your House” and the latter part of "Bladder Sweat aka Colon Soup Rockin’ the Mic.” But, like one sample says on "Idiot Savant Autistic Delivery”: "I let the music take me where it takes me … the fun is when you get the great moments.” And Awol delivers. "Bladder Sweat” starts strong with double-time raps before flipping some other styles, and "Finger Paint with Bloodlike War Paint” puts great vocals over a majestic choir and boom-bap. He even sounds like his old self on "Mechanical Angel In Purgatory,” while "Bootleg Monster Movies” lets loose the psychedelic funk in freeform to get the closest to the strange and experimental side of Awol that first attracted me with Evil Cow Burger’s "Live From Limbo.” But still, best interest is from the beats.