Rejjie Snow believes that his second album syncs perfectly with Willy Wonka & the Chocolate Factory, but then to be fair he does spend most of the album talking about the joys of getting high, so the mistake is admissible. With Baw Baw Black Sheep, the Dublin rapper has produced forty minutes of the most insouciant, stress-free and luxurious hip-hop this side of Dream Warriors, an album to escape into.
‘Mirrors’ is gently euphoric, a track that could fit seamlessly onto The Avalanches’ Since I Left You, its lilting, woodwind breeze fooling you into thinking you can hear the grass growing all around you, while Snow’s lyrics thematically read as the stoner rap version of Harry Nilsson’s ‘Everybody’s Talkin’’. ‘On and On’ lounges with its blunted beats, Snow’s voice tripping along half a step faster than the music seems able to keep up with, while ‘Skip to My Lou’ finds a mantra-like calm in the simplicity of its lyrics, burying deeper into the groove the longer the track continues.
The munchies strike twice on the album: first with ‘Oreos’, with its bed of cool jazz keys and upright bass, and most brilliantly with ‘Cookie Chips’, the album’s calling card, which includes a pearl of a feature from the late MF DOOM, placing him in a daisy age context that is thrilling and poignant in equal measure. There is nothing on the album that disrupts Snow’s chill, and consequently the monotony may cause the record to simply drift past some listeners, but Snow is at ease with his style and isn’t about to change that now.
