!d Obelus

Sure, it’s obviously nerdy white boy art rap but !d Obelus is pretty damn good at it. Years of creating lo-fi, self-released cassettes and CD-Rs have honed this rural rapper’s skills until he’s now properly prepared to release this, his first professional record. And the experience shows. With a varied selection of simple, minimal productions, Obelus is given plenty of room to manoeuvre his singsong flow, which he often punctuates with spontaneous bursts of rapid-fire raps. His style stands out but short pieces throughout the album are nostalgic reminders of other nasal MC faves like Ad-Rock, Tom Green and Thesis. While there is the odd dud found among the album’s 21 tracks, they are far outweighed by interesting and exciting songs like slamming vocal opener "Soul Dispersion,” beautiful anti-meat ode "Sixteen Pounds of Grain,” koto-sampling "Tokyo” and a couple of different takes on electro rap with "Voyage From the Front Line” and "Atomic Hot Dog Gods.” Flyourfavorite may be a little bit too long but it has enough good moments to make the extra time worth it.