If indie-rap heads weren't sure what to make of Homeboy Sandman as the calendar flipped over to 2012, they've had so many opportunities to figure him out that anybody still left behind has just about lost. We're talking six releases of note in just over 24 months—Subject: Matter, Chimera, First of a Living Breed, Kool Herc: Fertile Crescent, and All That I Hold Dear all dropped through 2013, with White Sands, his first release of 2014, making it half a dozen. If you've ever tried to commit yourself to getting into Sandman's dryly incisive style—all scalpel-wielding deadpan and internally knotted wit and ha-ha-wait one-liners—there're more fresh entry points than Sonny Corleone post-tollbooth.
But if you're not converted yet, why not go for the EP produced by the man who helped get Danny Brown's “Wonderbread” permanently lodged in countless listener's brains? Paul White's contributions to Old authoritatively put White on the radar, but his years' worth of previous work included a couple collaborations with Homeboy Sandman that already set a positive precedent. Sandman's White collabs on the Chimera EP breathed vividly through minor-key Michael Mann glow (“Look Out”) and VHS-fidelity late-summer soul murk (“They Can't Hang (Word to the Mother)”). And his spot the next year waxing anxious over a stargazing shuffle beat on White's Watch the Ants endcap “Find a Way” made it clear they had a mutually beneficial set of styles going.
Hence *White Sands—*even the title's slick wordplay makes this team-up seem preordained. Sandman's clear-eyed, clinical yet humane dissection of daily experience benefits from a similarly subdued production that holds just a few ripples of detectable tension beneath. White's sound here is the kind of thing worth conjuring up when attempting to figure out if there's such a thing as a Stones Throw house style: you get obscuro-soul beats filtered through quaver and hiss on some old-cassette shit, sawn-off basslines and snares that sound like baseball bats against padded walls, and vocals pitched up until they sound just the right side of bewildered. That, plus there's a goofy streak somewhere in there. I'm sure there are slower fadeouts than the dying-battery nod-off of “Fat Belly", but none I can think of that're accompanied by enthusiastic food crunching noises.
Granted, those crunching noises come after a bunch of verses relating to Sandman's vegan/organic/health food diet, which reclaims almond milk and lentils from hippie-dippie yuppie-shopper punchline status and flips it through his own eat-right lens in the tradition of A Tribe Called Quest's “Ham 'n' Eggs”. From there on out there's ample proof that Sandman's blend of straight-up rhyming, conceptual thrust, and worldbuilding storytelling is yet again on point. In doses of little interconnected one-liner details, unspooling over “I Saw a World” or “Bad Meaning Good", his negative-space-heavy hard-stop flow lets the snapshots come into focus. Bigger-picture stories feel like they could go on for another half-dozen verses—there's devastating depth to the broken woman depicted at the core of “Echoes” (“Her mother once beside herself with worry/ Now she wander right beside her none the wiser/ She didn't recognize her”). Sure, White Sands is something of a self-contained universe, another one-producer release in the tradition of "EL RNTC" collab Kool Herc: Fertile Crescent and the M. Slago-helmed All That I Hold Dear. But it's a universe with a lot to explore.
