Since July alone the former Das Racist member Kool A.D. has released more music than some artists do during their entire careers; September’s Peyote Karaoke was not Kool’s first but second 100-track project of the year (and including last year’s O.K., his third in less than 365 days). The common thread between these releases has been a sense of musical restlessness, and most of acted as folios for his omnivorous appetite. Have a Nice Dream, his eighth project of 2016, continues this trend of zooming in on one particular sound—or, in this case, less a formal style than a general and overarching mood.
A reflective and meditative release, Have a Nice Dream luxuriates in an off-kilter wooziness. Opener “Who Am I?”—the lone contribution from Bay Area beatmaker Trackademicks, who handled all of the production on August’s ode to hyphy Official—features dramatic strings, over which Kool A.D. guides himself through an existential crisis. Part ontological investigation and part braggadocio session, it’s vintage Kool A.D.: “Just like the leg on a centipede, everything’s everything/Look at my wings so feathery, look at my energy.” Kool’s vocals are slathered in layers of effects, creating the sensation of a hundred internal voices battling for prominence. Even so, it’s the most straightforward track on the EP.
“Who Am I?” also holds the distinction of being the only song where the primary draw is Kool A.D.’s rapping. “Just Like Magic” is a breezy electro-pop trifle as viewed through a funhouse mirror: a little goofy, its proportions exaggerated to near-comical level, and pleasantly disorienting. But its lack of structure gives it an amorphous first-draft quality that’s hard to shake. Kool A.D.’s collaboration with Francis and the Lights, the unhurried “It’s Alright 2 Cry,” boasts the most shape of anything on Have a Nice Dream, and it works because Kool manages to inject some irreverence into the self-seriousness that sometimes plagues solo Francis and the Lights material.
Kool A.D. is, after all, the kind of dude who opens a song titled “America Is Dead” by melodically singing “Swag swag/Bieber.” It’s this sort of no-fucks-given approach that lets him conclude the project with a straight-faced ambient track that stretches out for 32 minutes. Less “My First Ambient Song” than would might expect, the EP’s centerpiece drags on about ten minutes too long, but the title track’s first two-thirds do a good job of conjuring the kind of dread someone like Andy Stott is known for, albeit with a less suffocating (and less polished) lurch. It’s representative of Have a Nice Dream as a whole: expectedly unexpected, surprisingly effective if meandering, and decidedly low-stakes.
