Detroit rapper Quelle Chris has developed a distinct persona over the last several years: He's the funny dude with whom you can laugh about smoking weed and sexual cardio. He's always clever, and his nasal pitch goes well with the hazy funk beats he creates. Yet his new album, Innocent Country, is ruminative in a way we've never heard before. Quelle's 2013 full-length, the breakout Ghost at the Finish Line, found the MC/producer assessing the indie grind; Innocent Country is the inner dialogue of a man trying to understand his logic, no matter how random it is.
Yet Quelle doesn't fully articulate his views here; instead he just muddles through them. In a good way, Innocent Country resembles early Slum Village: The music has a cassette-worthy hiss that solidifies the album's nostalgia, and Quelle—whose Bandcamp is full of low-key gems—doesn't speak directly to his listeners. He flubs lines and trails off in other places. It's shoegazing in a pure form; he's just talking it out, hoping you catch a line or two.
That's most prevalent on "Well Running Deep". It feels like Quelle is rapping alone to a mirror, reciting the words from his rhyme book and locking them into memory. "I barely eat, and barely sleep," he raps, "'cause when I sleep, I'm just reacquainted with mistakes and paths that are way gone." Beneath the humor are the regrets he first examined on "Loop Dreams", a Ghost standout produced by Chris Keys, who handles all the beats on Country. The sound is loosely built around dusty drum breaks, and sonically, Keys seems influenced by early '90s West Coast rap—Cypress Hill or the Alkaholiks.
The soundtrack moves between wistful and nonsensical moments, which leads to a strong alliance with Quelle who, across several projects, uses conversational flows of disconnected thoughts. He strings those meditations into effective one-liners that somehow stick, even if they don't make sense. Quelle's impact isn't so much in what he says, but how he says it—with a blunted, nonchalant tone that draws comparisons to Redman. There's no shortage of randomness on Country: "Murphy's Law", featuring Crown Nation collaborator Denmark Vessey, is carried by a lo-fi Dilla-inspired beat (think Slum Village's "Fantastic") where the two riff on whatever comes to mind: houses getting robbed, pork belly, stock trading, and hedge funds. The next song, "Drugfest TooThousandToo", is a show-of-hands survey for your favorite narcotics ("Y'all fuckin' with them shrooms?!... How 'bout the meth").
Druggy satire is Quelle's thing, but Innocent Country is equally refreshing when the rapper reflects. On "I Asked God", Quelle revisits some old demons while the music conveys sullen remoteness. Yesterday, he says, "everything was where it belonged, but something went wrong." Quelle wakes up, dusts himself off, and tries to move forward. Yet, for reasons he can't fathom, he simply cannot. "Maybe it's the drink, maybe need to put down the bottle, or maybe I'm drunk/ Maybe it's the weed, maybe stop hittin' them high notes, or maybe I'm skunked right now." On Innocent Country, Quelle asks these kinds of questions without getting clear answers. Certain revelations take time to appear.
