There's a moment near the end of Busdriver's bewildering latest single, "Kill Your Employer", where, after several patch-ins and ad-libs, you hear the following muffled aside over a doorknocker beat: "I don't join the ranks of ordinary men/ I burn flags, not oil reserves/ I'm no ex-football player Iraqi combatant... who the fuck you think you're talking to? It's me..."
Well, no shit. No one's going to mistake that Cheshire-cat-on-Ritalin voice, no matter how much Busdriver may slow down and variate his flow. However, RoadKillOvercoat may be as far outside Busdriver's comfort zone as he can get: a slower, weirder, and less complacent record than he's ever done. DJ's Nobody and Boom Bip provide beats that draw from a wider range of styles and flirt with an alien, psychedelic edge, giving Busdriver enough room to be as weird as he wants to be. Tracks like "Secret Skin" could be the soundtrack to a fantasy-gorged Skittles commercial with its horse-clop drums and citrus-acid guitars, and closer "Dream Catcher's Mitt" is a campfire strum loaded with unusually saccharine verbosity from Busdriver. No more jazz-flute samples, no more backpacker aftertaste.
Can we blame him, though? 2005's Fear of a Black Tangent merged highly accessible beats with some of his sharpest and most sardonic observations, mostly on himself and his place in the marketplace. Critics who didn't get the joke suggested Busdriver didn't either, that he was bitter and lashing out. With that album he focused, and it didn't really pay off. Now, rather than bemoan his standing, he's actually trying to change it. Busdriver is no longer comfortable among the young intelligentsia, and he's even turned to bite the hands that've fed him in the disc's two pieces de resistance, "Kill Your Employer" and "Sun Shower", the latter sniping at sheltered art school attendees.
Drawing the listener in with a current, edgy beat just to smack them with a near-psychedelic chorus and a near-impenetrable lyric ("Post recreational paranoia is the sport of now") is a mischievous trick on "Employer", and the track for "Sun Showers" is more ominous, atmospheric rock than rap. But while "Sun Shower" is terribly catchy and uncompromising, Busdriver sounds awkward over it. More than that, his targets here seem ill-defined, and lyrics that might work as (and should be) throwaways hog attention: "well-pruned yuppie scum," spoiled "art-school kids" and other hapless bourgeoisie in "Sun Shower", or kids "smearing salad on [their] SUV" and the aforementioned "ex-football playing Iraqi combatants" in "Kill Your Employer". These criticisms are a little too easy, especially coming from a guy who's displayed more subtlety and wit when freestyling at a drive-thru window. Busdriver is smarter than this.
Not that RoadKillOvercoat is a complete 180-- opener "Casting Agents and Callgirls" crams hooks like last-minute travelers stuffing a suitcase, but follower "Less Yes's, More No's" could have fit comfortably on Black Tangent with its scraping stun-gun beat, and the latter half of the disc returns to more sparse beats and rap aerobatics of his earlier career with tracks like "Pompous Posies! Your Party's No Fun" or "(Bloody Paw on the) Kill Floor". And there are other moments where he fits just fine in new contexts: The sugary sampling of "The Troglodyte Wins" is poppy but bare, and his delivery is what sells it, sounding like he's dancing among the new drapes when he's actually skewering America's current head of state. Then there's "Mr. Mistake (Bested by the Whisper Chasm)", a more introspective and intimate song where Busdriver lowers his tone to a multi-tracked monotone whisper. It's a highly effective curveball that's still pretty pop, and proves Busdriver could have broke new ground without stretching himself to the extent he has here.
I wouldn't fault an underground wunderkind for pushing himself out of his comfort zone, and there's only a few moments overall where Busdriver's a square peg in a round hole (it's just a shame those moments are the album's centerpieces). It sounds like a guy who doesn't want to be at a party, but grimaces and turns up the charm-- to paraphrase an old Dismemberment Plan lyric, he sounds like himself, but more so. Maybe some thought Busdriver sounded self-satisfied before, but he used to sound one step ahead of the listener instead of running to catch up.
