Alexander Spit's A Breathtaking Trip to That Otherside had a lot going for it: a style steeped in modernized psychedelic hip-hop culture, lyrics that deftly mixed the druggy offbeat with the perceptive on-point, and production that made an intriguingly blurry take on a Bay-to-L.A. lineage of influence. The latter stood out the most: While Spit's a good rapper who can catch a ride off mind-altering hedonism and sneak some blacklit profundity into the bargain, his touch with a chopped-up loop is impeccable, sourcing a long bloodline of classic West Coast funk-- g or otherwise-- and putting it to use shining god rays through cloud rap. While his beats have been almost exclusively used in his own work, it's easy to imagine him cranking out enough extra quality work to supply any of the likeminded MCs who parallel that aesthetic. And if for some reason you're not feeling his words, the beats go a long way in justifying them.
Spit's latest beat tape, Mansions 2, is the second in a series of instrumental releases that narrows in on short little flashes of inspiration and strings them along for brief but engrossing moments. And while there's something that feels a little placeholder-ish about it-- his beats don't always feel complete without his liquid Evidence-turned-skate rat voice-- it measures up well in a crowded field filled with Donuts-vibing Cali bedroom beatmakers. If there's a drum loop on a track, best believe it'll get refracted, split, switched up, and scattered in a way that throws it out of joint without knocking it out of its groove. If there's an identifiable canonical sample, it'll be flipped in a way that's restlessly transformative-- slowed to a half-tempo crawl; phased into headswimming oblivion. If there's a vocal drop, it'll mean something more than just a one-liner distraction, as everything from Hustler's Convention's pool-shark verse ("Billiards for Billions") to a kid's story about a trick-or-treating fatality ("...?") to a news piece about a $220 million penthouse ("The Sky Is Falling") builds a sonic travelogue that's like walking through a crumbling Richard Neutra house on a mushroom high.
As journeys go, the scenery changes frequently. One moment, it's all hazy boom-bap tweaks of early 80s R&B for low-lit late-night smokeouts ("Cocaine"; "Ouija Board Coffee Table"). The next, you might slide into a Southern-inflected cut with 808s that rattle like bill counters under a layer of diamond-shine electric pianos ("Pullover Hoodies"). The impact can gently wash over you with stripped-down codeine strings ("Kubrick Halls") and jazz-piano minimalism ("Baldwin by the Endless Pool"), or run up and dummy-smack you until you've got prizefighter snares and Nintendo final-stage basslines rattling through your ears ("Panic Room"). While the mood tends to swing from mellowed-out bliss to mellowed-out dread, there's a dominant sense of unpredictable playfulness that coheres into its own self-contained universe.
Positioning Spit's work against that of his peers isn't the easiest comparative exercise-- it has all the hallmarks of whatever "psychedelic instrumental hip-hop" implies without incorporating the heavy-rock vibes of Gaslamp Killer, Madlib's grimy-workshop sludge, or Flying Lotus' art jazz leanings. And while he shares Dilla's affinity for chopped vocal syllables and Tyco Nite-Glow bass, there are still enough elements from the last five years' worth of post-based airiness and bass-music fusion to duck carbon-copy affectations. It's one of those situations where playing games of spot-the-influence will inevitably end in those influences receding far off into the distance-- an album that sounds less like someone you've heard of than someplace you haven't.
