"Rella" video: Hodgy Beats shoots lasers from his crotch that turn girls into cats, Domo Genesis smacks a black girl in the face and she turns Asian, Tyler as a coke-snorting centaur.
"NY (Ned Flander)" video: Hodgy as a deadbeat dad preoccupied with softcore porn, Tyler's head on a baby's body.
If you thought that one-two punch of videos for the lead singles from The OF Tape Vol. 2 was the beginning of the end for the notorious gang of L.A. skate punks, you weren't alone. Never mind that the songs were fine, but for a crew whose visuals were as important to their meteoric rise as their music (if not more), those big-budget videos suggested Tyler and the rest of Odd Future had forgotten why they became such a big deal. Both clips try to get over on low-level shock value, but in playing up their propensity to rankle casual onlookers, the group overlooked that they became a sensation first and foremost because of their dynamic and unique chemistry. Their insularity and aura is what draws people to them and that was wiped away by sterile video sets and CGI.
"Oldie" video: While at a Terry Richardson photo shoot, the entire Wolf Gang stages an impromptu video, reciting their verses from the album's closing track. They interrupt each other, bust each other's balls, play hypeman for each other, and laugh and smile a hell of a lot. Its lo-fi spontaneity is as close as we've gotten to the group's early videos, and it looks like the most fun you could have on any given day. This is no coincidence. The energy and camaraderie that ignites the video is the purest distillation of Odd Future's accidental genius, and after a year-plus of overwrought attempts to continually up the shock level, it's a much-needed breath of fresh air. This is great news, but even better is that The OF Tape Vol. 2 as a whole shares more with the "Oldie" video than the other two. The tape incorporates all of Odd Future's members with surprising ease (not an easy task considering all the stylistic differences at play) and pieces together the first release in over a year that'll remind people why they liked the group so much in the first place.
Part of it is just mathematical. Contributions here are less than any one person would put into a solo album, and though that simple formula doesn't always equal success when it comes to group records, every member here benefits from the arrangement. For guys like Hodgy and Domo, there's barely any room for filler lines (let alone filler verses), and that helps mask their lesser-developed personas. As for Tyler, well, at the moment, less Tyler is better than more Tyler. His presence still dominates the album, but his charms are more apparent and his abrasiveness is easier to digest than on Goblin. Those three show up on nearly half of these tracks, and that's crucial to the album's success since any combination of the three works well together. This is often thanks to Hodgy, whose versatility finds him just as comfortable turning up the aggression with Tyler on "NY (Ned Flander)" as he is trading verbal workouts with Domo on "Bitches" for style points.
But the album is a success mainly because everyone simply steps it up. Domo in particular seems to have evolved from the group's bumbling stoner into a guy who can spit dizzying, complicated verses. Even the peripheral members manage to hit it out of the park when given their turns: Mike G's "Forest Green" has been out for close to a year, but its inclusion here is obvious and deserved. Syd has show-stopping turns as a singer at the end of "Analog 2" and on the Internet's "Ya Know", the latter being a more successful take on the sort of lounge-soul that Pharrell used to awkwardly dabble in. Frank Ocean swings by for a few hooks plus "White", his lone solo contribution, which will add Stevie Wonder to the list of classic singers he's usually compared to. Even "We Got Bitches", Tyler, Jasper, and Taco's second stab at an affectionate Waka parody, is almost good enough to make up for Goblin's "Bitch Suck Dick".
Which brings us back to "Oldie". The 10-minute-plus track closes an album that's probably too long in the first place, and in theory it borders on overkill. But it's a reminder that when you strip away all the noise, there's just a group of rappers here, and pretty good ones at that. Maybe it's also a reminder to Odd Future that their skills can allow them to stand on their own, teen dreams of wild music videos be damned. Oh, and the return of Earl Sweatshirt doesn't hurt either.
