Since his career began, Lance Skiiiwalker has been painted as one of a kind. The Chicago-born vocalist and producer, aka Lance Howard, first popped during a weekend trip to Los Angeles, when a friend who managed a clothing store on Fairfax put on one of his beat tapes. Two customers who patronized the store that day happened to be former Top Dawg Entertainment president Dave Free and Kendrick Lamar, who were so impressed with his music that they had the manager call Skiiiwalker back to the store to meet him. He quickly fell in with TDE’s inner circle, becoming a fixture at the Carson house that served as their de facto headquarters, and bringing woozy touches of R&B, funk, jazz, and hip-hop to songs from Jay Rock’s “Money Trees Deuce” to Kendrick’s “untitled 04 08.14.2014.” He was called a “mad scientist,” a “glitch in the system” capable of unlocking a song’s potential.
After becoming something of a secret weapon for the label, Skiiiwalker signed to TDE in 2016 and dropped his solo debut, the warped and hazy Introverted Intuition. It was certainly unprecedented by Top Dawg standards, an album that dabbled in several genres without committing to any. Songs meander from crunchy beat music and wafting R&B to new-age funk; they feel like attempts to buck convention by throwing everything at the wall. But aside from establishing what separated him from his labelmates, Introverted Intuition offered little insight into Skiiiwalker himself. Being freewheeling is one thing; get too untethered, though, and the ideas simply float away, as sweetly ephemeral as vape smoke. Audiodidactic, his first proper album in seven years, following a handful of EPs, trudges even further into Skiiiwalker’s imagination. Every song is awash in a psychedelic haze that misses the very dreamlike quality it aims for; Skiiiwalker sounds lost in a musical echo chamber of his own creation.
He deserves credit for having honed his craft. His production work on albums like SiR’s 2019 album Chasing Summer and Isaiah Rashad’s 2021 comeback record The House Is Burning pushed Skiiiwalker to develop his piano, vocal, and plugin skills. That dedication informs the album, right down to its title. Through self-teaching and instinctive wanderlust, Skiiiwalker pulls from multiple stylistic corners: neo-soul, prog rock, the 2010s California beat scene. Unfortunately, he’s so determined to throw the listener off his trail that Audiodidactic often feels adrift, the vibes left frustratingly indistinct.
It’s a shame, because in the few places that things come together, Skiiiwalker plays with interesting textures. Audiodidactic’s best moments, self-produced cuts like the shoegaze-esque single “Beantown” or the crisp, futuristic groove of “It Was All,” achieve a soothing mesh of bass, synths, and vocals swirling like quasars. “IG,” another highlight, captures the beauty of smashing punk rhythms and chirpy, muted keys together. The rest of the album tries to stretch across styles but comes out amorphous and bland. Muddy vocals on the Groove-produced opener “Friends” and the title track melt into fields of saxophone and plugin-soaked synths, attempts at collaging that register only as background noise. Many of these songs have pretty melodies (like the Matt Miller-produced “Everybody Hurts Somebody”) but can’t corral them into concrete ideas; instead, they just dissolve into a mush of colors and influences.
Skiiiwalker is a talented musician with good connections who has yet to figure out how to translate his faculties into solo work that amounts to more than a bunch of genres rubbing shoulders for the sake of it. Not that there’s anything inherently wrong with that: Lil Yachty’s recent excursion into psychedelic synth rock and funk, Let’s Start Here, is also a mess of a record, but Yachty’s passion and presence keep things more focused. Texas singer-producer Liv.e’s recent Girl in the Half Pearl is more successful, weaving gauzy R&B, drum’n’bass, and synth funk into a rich tapestry of love in all its forms. Much of Audiodidactic, on the other hand, feels anonymous, like an amalgamation of Robert Glasper, Mndsgn, and Shabazz Palaces songs searching for a binding agent. Until Skiiiwalker can add some more interesting ideas of his own to the mix, it will be difficult to tell where his influences end and he begins.
