Illa J is the younger brother of the late stoner-rap deity J Dilla. That in itself speaks to some fundamental lameness, like if Jay-Z had a rapping younger brother who called himself Zee-J. More to the point, his familial connection to a great dead producer appears to be Illa's chief qualification to release an album. On the interlude "Alien Family", Dilla associate Frank Nitty tries to make a case for this particular feat of nepotism, testifying as to the musical abilities of the entire Yancey clan: "It's like they the Jackson 5 from Mars." If you say so, Frank Nitty.
And yet Yancey Boys does work pretty well because of that familial connection: Illa exclusively works with previosuly unheard mid-1990s Dilla beats, and a new album full of old Dilla beats is never a bad thing. Dilla apparently left behind a Tupac-level archive of unused material when he died in 2006, and Yancey Boys is pretty much 48 minutes' worth of the producer's trademark glimmering murk. It's a good little, unhurried, rainy-afternoon rap album. Dilla had a definite formula-- amniotic soups of echoed-out Fender Rhodes, sharp snares, gurgley bass, precisely sloppy record-scratches-- yet surprises do pop up every once in a while on Yancey Boys. "We Here" swipes the drums from Kraftwerk's "Trans-Europe Express". "All Good" employs someone running a stick up and down one of those wooden crocodile sculptures. Mostly, though, these old beats just thump away in a comforting sort of fog.
As for Illa, he's got a rapping voice way more soft and delicate than the vaguely clumsy tough-guy yammer Dilla himself usually used. At times, Illa recalls a seriously stoned and vaguely bored Q-Tip. His lyrics are heavy on digression. On "Strugglin'", apropos of nothing: "My favorite White Stripes album is Elephant/ OK, I know that's irrelevant/ But that's my shit." "IllaSoul" is a weird sort of a come-on song, Illa getting stoned and staring at the ocean while at the same time hitting on some girl. Actual lyric: "I'm so glad that we got we/ And also, I'm so glad that we got weed."
But Illa spends at least as much time singing in a relaxed soul-singer falsetto coo as he does rapping-- and he rarely diverts attention from the beats, which makes him a more appropriate vessel for them than a prominent Dilla collaborator like Common or Busta Rhymes would've been. Illa recalls fellow indie-rap psych-traveller Aloe Blacc in the way he mixes Sam Cooke harmonies with utilitarian rapper. But unlike Aloe, Illa rarely gives the impression that he's doing anything more than fucking around in the studio. This, after all, the sort of album where someone says, "I grab your derriere and vibrateth my fingertips" in a vampire accent over "Für Elise". At the end of "Sounds Like Love", Illa ad-libs, almost to himself, "It's just the music. It speaks for himself." He's right. And thanks to his brother's beyond-the-grave contributions, he himself is the most disposable part of his own debut album. Luckily for him, it probably won't be too hard to find another hour's worth of unused Dilla tracks when it comes time to record the follow-up.
