Krispy Kream and Rah Al Milio of the Knux can see the future, or at least Interscope's Jimmy Iovine hopes so. Remind Me In 3 Days, despite being the first LP from the N.O.-to-L.A. duo, finds them bypassing the typical come-up narrative and indulging in all the trappings of tacky new money-- pricey drugs, conciliatory women, and the VIP parties where both are readily accessible. And if we're to believe the rumors, Interscope emptied the bank to get them a Hollywood Hills crash pad where it could all go down. Blame it on the instructive misfortunes of the hipster rap movement the Knux like to claim they started, but not since the Game's Documentary has a hip-hop debut been more obsessed with Los Angeles celebrity culture or insulated from commercial failure-- hate it or love it.
It would be nice to separate the marketing of Remind Me In 3 Days from the record itself, but the marketing kinda is the story. But the Knux have a bulletproof first line of defense against beging dismissed as Complex Magazine fodder. Beyond the fact that they vaguely allude to some pretty serious criminal records on "Bang, Bang!" and "The Train" (their "Cocaine Blues"), they can flow in ways that defy mere '88-deification. But it's not like their influences are any less obvious or critically acclaimed. Their high-NRG electro-funk has been likened to Stankonia, but a more accurate comparison is the lower-stakes artistic risks of Speakerboxxx filtered through Southernplayalistic's (mostly) party and bullshit concerns. And if that has you expecting an album's worth of "We Luv Deez Hoes", well...it's not too far off. Highlights like "Fire (Put It in the Air)" and "Bang Bang!" feature a similar mix of hands-up choruses, rock overtones, and agile raps that are playful enough (see the cruelly blueballed second verse of "Cappuccino") to counter the lapse into misogyny.
But where their heroes balanced crowd-movers with truly moving life lessons, the Knux follow up the early knockouts carelessly toggling between bromide and bromance. Tellingly, the standout is a BBD-meets-SAE new jack swinger about snorting past sexual inhibitions ("Powder Room"). While a consistent philosophy isn't a necessity on a debut album, you wonder who they're finding issue with. Like on their lost girl lament "Shine Again", a disturbingly hollow show of empathy to the women they brag about fucking on just about every other song. And then there's "Daddy's Little Girl", possibly the record's most immediate hook, with its female vocal that veers perilously close to latter-day Black Eyed Peas. Maybe they intended to fly low enough to hit their target, but it doesn't make it any more listenable, nor does its dissection of celebutante culture that digs no deeper than Beverly Hills Chihuahua*.*
And yet, even though Knux lay claim to more traditional rap credentials than most of their peers, they also suggest that they're pretty much opting out of the rap game. Hoo boy, are there guitars on this, and they're played by the Knux themselves. But as much as this proves a facile marketing weapon, it just as often works to their disadvantage. The first time the six-strings pop up, they add a nice espresso jolt to "The List", functioning as a hook for a song that doesn't really have one, while "Cappuccino" and "Bang Bang!" are girded by grooves as thick and tightly coiled as bridge cable. But on "Roxxanne" and "Hush", the live instrumentation just functions as window-dressing to impress people who probably aren't all that familiar with guitar-based music. Names like Franz Ferdinand and Bloc Party have been thrown out there. But the predominant sound is the palm-muted buffoonery found on the first N.E.R.D. album run through the kind of blown-out, rhythm-dulling, factory preset reverb and distortion tone that drives guitar store employees to think hard about grad school.
So, yeah-- for a record that's engineered to please everyone from crate diggers to rockist Luddites (namechecks: Johnny Cash 1, Ca$h Money 0) to "all the skaters in Venice fucking with the Knux," Remind Me In 3 Days is every bit as likely to piss people off. While the first 20 minutes supply an appropriately cocaine-like high (with the requisite comedown), what's really missing is the debut they somehow skipped over, one where they could've showed where their passion comes from, rather than merely being actors in a Hills-hop hybrid.
