For the Southern California rap duo Audio Push, adaptability has been a double-edged sword. Oktane and Price have been in the industry for nearly a decade, and though they’ve been signed and released by Interscope twice since 2009, and have released a dozen mixtapes, two EPs and two studio albums in that time, they remain anonymous to many rap fans. It’s not for lack of talent; more for lack of a stable identity. Since entering the industry, during the Great Jerkin’ Craze of 2009, the Inland Empire natives have tried on so many looks, from aping Tribe to aping Lil Wayne, that it’s become difficult for the casual fan to pick them out of a lineup. They have no trouble keeping up with the times; in fact, their problem is that they blend in too well with whatever’s going on.
The duo’s grab-bag approach continues on their third studio album, Cloud 909, an 18-track marathon with more good than bad but little of substance. With its constant toggling between conscious, swag, and street lyricism amid its peaceful, sun-warmed beats, it splits the difference between early Kendrick and current Drake, and loses much of the charisma somewhere in the middle. Oktane and Price are strong rappers, with flexible flows and a gift for beat selection. Their music is polished and professional. But, if you have ten hours to burn, you can listen to the new record ten times over and come out knowing very little about either one of them.
That’s partly because whole songs are given over to nonsense. Take “No Bad Days,” for instance, all haze and bass rumble, over which the duo are content to stay firmly within cliché. At least a portion of the album seems to be freestyled: When Price (or is it Oktane?) raps on the latter half of “Update” that he’s going off the dome, it’s a kind of eureka moment, given how little order there was in the verse that came before. And even when the rappers drop a profound line, they switch subjects so swiftly that the seriousness comes to seem like a cheap device. On the opening track, “Clouds,” we learn that in Inland Empire, funerals are so frequent “half of us stopped dressing formal.” But a couple bars later, the fact that kids are listening to Lil Yachty over Biggie is lamented in exactly the same tone.
This somewhat flip feeling use of casual violence is also part of a barely legible recurring skit, in which Oktane (or is it Price?) leaves a heated situation to chill with his girl. These poorly acted moments add little to the album and it’s unclear exactly why they exist, other than to give the duo a prompt to rap from, as if they’re conducting a cipher and being offered topical suggestions. The most unintentionally comical of these moments precedes the song “Sanctified,” when the protagonist’s mother calls and leaves a message. “I heard there’s a lot going on in the streets, I need you to come to church to get sanctified,” she says, sounding just unbelievably bored, almost exactly the opposite of the tone you’d expect a worried mother to take. The message leads into this hook: “Pull up with the squad and shit/Looking like Gods and shit/All of that hatin’/I ain’t even bothered with/Everything sanctified.” It’s safe to say that the song doesn’t dwell on the sacraments or otherwise make hay out of its ostensibly religious theme.
Some personality peeks through on “Honda,” a frank if somewhat self-righteous ode to financial modesty that’s reminiscent, with its spare guitar beat, of West Coast stalwart Baby Bash. The best song here, “Pump Fake,” opens with Price rapping in double-time over a snappy beat that could have made the first YG album, with its canny combination of gleaming synths, snares and bass. It’s a perfect production cue for the duo—they can ride just about anything, and the more space the beat takes up, the less heavy lifting the lyrics have to do.
It’s not unusual for rappers with sharply developed flows to have a similar problem, particularly now that a marketplace that used to be saturated with lyrical lyricists has come to value a variety of other skill sets. Joey Bada$$ had a similar issue when he first emerged: the smoothness of his flow could trick you (and apparently him) into thinking he had more to say than he did. But the New Yorker was 17 when his head-turning first mixtape came out in 2012, about the age that Oktane and Price were when they first got signed. They’ve named two of their three studio albums with the area codes of their hometown, while one mixtape was simply named Inland Empire. This constant reference to where they’re from isn’t reflected by any kind of substantive pride in the music; it feels more like the person who doesn’t know what kind of tattoo to get, so they get copy after copy of their state outline or state flag. There’s nothing wrong with those tattoos, but would you get three of them?
