Sixteen years separates The Album and The Second Album. That's a preposterous amount of time, even when you consider everything that the two members of epochal Bay Area indie rap duo Latyrx have been up to in the interim. Lyrics Born has lent his good-natured conversational virtuosity to a string of adequate-to-great solo albums (great-to-adequate if you're going chronologically). Lateef the Truth Speaker's gruff fluidity, meanwhile, was typically paired with specific one-producer one-offs and/or short-lived supergroups—think Maroons or the Mighty Underdogs. But consider everything that's happened in underground hip-hop over that stretch: labels have risen and fallen, more than a dozen different movements, regions, subgenres, and styles have infiltrated each other, and the Solesides/Quannum collective that launched some of the best hip-hop records of the late 90s has largely receded into the background. Why that is owes a little to the fickleness of enduring fashionability in hip-hop, even the alt-rap sectors—but long-term inspiration isn't a common commodity, either.
That could explain why The Second Album feels so scattered and frantic. Lateef and Lyrics Born would sound pretty good just going on cruise control, letting their acrobatic, complementary flows hold the weight and making even workaday lyrics seem spectacular. To their credit, they don't come across like the complacent types who would resort to slacking like that—but ambition without inspiration can lead into some pretty ridiculous places, all hacky-sack silliness and earnestness so overbearing it actually sounds false. It doesn't matter how trendy their blend of political indie-minded lyricism and lighthearted, rib-poking internal punchlines is or isn't; what matters is that the strain to outdo themselves drives them to undo themselves instead. It's the difference between getting lifted by good-vibe sunshiney rap, and getting thrown by constantly being asked if you're having a good time.
This overreach grates because it doesn't allow much room for nuance, or setup, or much breathing room at all, really. The way opener “Arrival” muddles its comeback narrative/populist defiance in Hooray for Everything stream-of-consciousness leaves behind the mildly buzzy vapor of what could either be a call to arms or a frozen yogurt commercial. That vagueness is ramped up by a scattered sociopolitical POV that takes loose feints at broad issues: gun culture's drawbacks, tragedies and consequences are yammered out to empty rapidfire effect in “Reload", and the obvious punchline of “The Power of Rumor (Leonard Is Lost)”—a mysterious posted message that leads to riots and media overkill turns out to be for a lost cat—builds a cautionary tall tale out of frivolous hyperbole that's as funny as a cinderblock to the foot. Even when things divert more towards the day-to-day ordinary, like the pseudo-virtuoso rap-about-rap-about-rap “Deliberate Gibberish” (“Look at little ol' me/ I'm a unicorn king/ And my heart on my sleeve/ And a card up my sleeve/ Tell me what does that mean?”) or the unrequited love lament “Electric Chair” (“We're so close I see my reflection in your brown eyes/ Yet so far apart I might as well be on an asteroid”), there's this weird sense of the lyrics trying to be deadly serious and lightheartedly amusing at the same time, while failing at both.
With that in mind, the production almost seems like an afterthought, even if some of the names hold promise. Anticon vet Jel provides some decently low-end-reliant futurist space-funk on “Arrival” and “Reload,” the instrumentals of which would've fit in well with the solid Late Pass album he dropped earlier this year. And bringing in tUnE-yArDs to give Merrill Garbus' swirling loop-driven builds a more explicit hip-hop context was an inspired move, even if the relative minimalism of “Watershed Moment", with its sparse vocal harmonies and reliance on a stark drum loop, is a better fit than the manic “O Superman” gasps on “Deliberate Jibberish”. But those two producers' divergent styles are already enough at odds with each other, and filling out the rest of the production slate on The Second Album with similarly grab-bag sounds keeps things frustratingly scattered.
The album's home stretch gets the most ridiculous with it: the Decemberists' Chris Funk fiddles around with gothic bongo breaks on “Sometimes Why?”, Future People's generic indie-electro-pop runs through “Every Man for Himself”, some low-key riffage from Living Colour's Corey Glover is the only sign of life in the emo-hop trudge of “Electric Chair", and the closing “Gorgeous Spirits (Aye Let's Go)” is grotesque caricaturized circa-'06 hyphy that doesn't do justice to Lateef, Lyrics Born, hyphy, the Bay, 2006, or anything else it touches. This isn't the Latyrx that won over backpackers and Cali-funk fans back in '97—far from it. It's not much of a reunion, that's for sure, and sixteen years is a long time to wait for a sophomore slump.
