The artist known as ovrkast. emerged seemingly out of nowhere last year with a producer credit on Earl Sweatshirt’s FEET OF CLAY. The Oakland-based producer’s sole contribution to the project, “EL TORO COMBO MEAL,” is a static-heavy slice of chopped-up sampledelia: rumbling drums, a scattered piano line, and cooing, soulful voices. Ovrkast. would probably be familiar only if you’d spent a lot of time digging on Bandcamp, as I’m sure Earl Sweatshirt has. He’s been posting beats there since at least 2016—jazzy and Nujabes-like in their sound, scavenged a capellas woven in and out, with track titles like “.08lamplites[recipe]” and “shouldaz[dust]” that recall of lo-fi beat mastermind Knxwldge’s method of stylizing song names. He’s kept a humble profile in the months since his professional debut, but ovrkast. makes his official introduction with the mixtape Try Again.
Ovrkast. came onto the radar as a producer, but here he also expresses himself lyrically—he began writing bars even before he started making beats, according to a recent Twitter Q&A. His production has an ever-so-light jazz texture, and his rapping does too: not flashy, but bouncy and dense, with a slight monotone edge that demands extra attention to take stock of what he’s saying. There’s a track entitled “2 Minute Bars,” and hardly a song stretches beyond that length. Ovrkast.’s compositions are breakfast nooks, not big rooms—he fits a wealth of words into a small space without making it feel like too many words, not the easiest balance for any backpack-friendly rapper to strike. He doesn’t sound unconfident, but there is an almost intentional shyness to his delivery, a quiet moodiness or restraint, and his voice often comes at us through the sound of tape crackle. There’s a consistent tone across the album’s nine beats, and ovrkast. carefully curates his guest features too, surrounding himself with acclaimed and esoteric lyricists like Mavi and Pink Siifu.
Try Again shows us an artist’s struggle to show himself—as his moniker suggests, ovrkast.’s persona remains cloudy and obscured. His identity-related dilemmas are most explicit on “Face,” featuring the Earl Sweatshirt-affiliated Navy Blue (aka professional skater Sage Elsesser), where his anguish forms the song’s chorus: “Everywhere, like I don’t know my place/I got people waitin’ on me/Still though, I can’t show my face.” At times, like on the tape’s title track, the mood approaches upbeat, but confidence and anxiety are two sides of the same coin—the drums soften and slow, and the song’s central call to “do it all over, try again” mutates from an affirmational mantra into a self-critical monologue, ovrkast. overwhelmed at the blank pages in front of him and the words waiting to be written.
On “Interlude,” ovrkast. lets an audio clip of painter Kerry James Marshall talking about Ralph Ellison’s Invisible Man outline the thesis of his tape. Marshall reflects on Ellison’s notion of the “simultaneity” of African American life, a kind of dually felt “presence and absence,” which inspired Marshall’s play with different values of black in his own work. Presence and absence offers a useful paradigm for approaching ovrkast.—we see inside his mind, but he still finds a way to keep his distance. Like Kerry James Marshall, ovrkast. is working with color temperature, crafting his sounds in grayscale. He writes bars that require unpacking, but even when rapping, ovrkast. thinks like a producer, as concerned with texture as he is with text. The shades he works in are primarily charcoal and silver, but the spectrum of cool feelings is rich.
