For a certain kind of hip-hop fan—say, those who proudly owned a Mo’ Wax T-shirt—the return of Dr. Octagon is big news. Although often seen as a Kool Keith solo project, Dr. Octagon’s 1996 debut album Dr. Octagonecologyst sprang from a collaboration between Keith, producer Dan “The Automator” Nakamura, and turntablist DJ QBert (with input from KutMasta Kurt). The group assembled an album that delighted rap fans with its left-field production and grotesque humor. Moosebumps is not quite the sequel to that record (that dubious honor falls to 2006’s disastrous The Return of Dr. Octagon), but Moosebumps certainly feels like it should be, as Keith, Nakamura, and QBert reunite to cook up a faithful reproduction of the Octagonecologyst sound.
Of the three, QBert’s work on Moosebumps is perhaps least essential but most instantly impressive. His brand of battle turntablism may have fallen out of fashion since 1996, a year when crabs, flares, and tears were part of stock hip-hop vocabulary, but he remains as sharp as ever, spraying the mix with frantic, jazzy scratches that enhance the music without overcoming it. “Bear Witness IV,” a woozy remake of Octagonecologyst’s “Bear Witness,” shows QBert at his freeform best, his dextrous work a reminder of how scratching can make the turntables just sing.
If QBert’s contribution is the whipped cream to the Octagon gateau, then Nakamura provides the cakey base. Nakamura uses dusty drum breaks, funk bass lines, horns, piano, and strings, peppered with just the right amount of weirdness, to recreate the surreal boom bap soundtrack style of Octagonecologyst. Those who welcome Moosebumps as an exercise in sentimentality will find Nakamura’s production to be a very satisfying retread of old ground—the haunting violin sound on “Operation Zero” raises happy memories of Octagonecologyst’s “Blue Flowers,” for example—but some of the best moments come when the producer switches things up a little, using sleazy guitar riffs on the swaggering “Karma Sutra” and a sun-swept ambient funk on “Flying Waterbed.”
On Dr. Octagonecologyst, Keith employed vivid non sequiturs, free association, and catchphrase-friendly punch lines as he brilliantly traced the adventures of a homicidal, sex-obsessed surgeon who can travel through time. On Moosebumps he returns to Octagonecologyst’s central character but the results are considerably less sharp, with moments of pointed comic brilliance like, “You wait for X-rays having sex with a neck brace” swamped by a lackluster opacity. Opening track “Octagon Octagon” is the worst offender, with Keith reeling off an increasingly exasperating list of Octagon products (“Octagon rice with octagon beans with octagon shrimp”) as he rips the momentum from under one of Nakamura’s strongest beats.
Nakamura says that Dr. Octagon has “always looked to the future.” But rather than a futuristic conquest, Moosebumps brings to mind a collection of recently discovered Octagonecologyst outtakes. Dr. Octagonecologyst was an album that offered a genuinely unhinged alternative to the 1996 class of hip-hop and Keith, Nakamura, and QBert have recreated its uniquely creep chemistry in style. And yet only a handful of the tracks on Moosebumps—“Operation Zero,” the ghoulish head nodder “Area 54,” and maybe “Flying Waterbed”—would have stood a chance of making it onto the group’s first album. Like Wu-Tang revivals and a good pair of Wallabees, Moosebumps will make aging hip-hop fans very happy. But new listeners are unlikely to come running at the good doctor’s call.
