Over the last few years, Alchemist has made the successful transformation from A-list beat provider to down-for-whatever oddball. Cooking up "GTAV" cuts alongside Oh No with one hand and wrangling up wild prog-psych headnod beat-tapes with the other, he somehow still has enough in the tank to work with everyone from Curren$y to Domo Genesis to Prodigy and to fuel idiosyncratically great supergroup projects like Gangrene, Step Brothers, and Durag Dynasty. It's an understated portfolio, but an amazing one, and it should elevate him out of the "recommended if you like Madlib" pantheon onto anyone's short list of greats.
Retarded Alligator Beats (eesh, that title) is another notch in the belt, even if it's kind of a shallow one—after all, it's only 20 minutes long. But since Alc's spent so much of his free (and paid) time plunging into the weirdo-sample abyss, even his less-substantial stuff finds a way to cohere. This time, it's through a dense patchwork of clipped soundbites, which offer alerts about train-derailing kids ("Retarded Alligator"), acid trip narratives ("A Million Cigarettes"), missives taken from '70s flicks like Black Caesar ("Muscular Infant") and The Gravy Train ("Kirk Fuckin Douglas"). These loosely connected pop-cultural riffs on power, money, drugs, violence, and corruption echo in some of Alc's jittery beats, like the four-note suspense-sting keyboards on "Muscular Infant" and a thousand-yard-stare of an acid-blues guitar lick on "Seven Minutes".
Retarded Alligator Beats is over in a flash, a bunch of ephemeral tracks that hint at the wider, weirder stuff Alchemist's been doing this decade. But even on a snapshot of an album like this, he can't keep from letting his love of headknock beats shine through. The 8-millimeter piano chords on "Jane Meets Chrissy", choppy loops of "Holy Tabernacle", and sizzling '70s synthesizer noodling of "Drug Break" all have some authoritative drum breaks underneath. That goes double for "Voodoo", the only rap track and one of numerous opportunities Alchemist has given Action Bronson to be unpredictably outlandish ("I'm not fat, I'm only robust/ Crash the Jeep into your crib until it blows up").
So with all that recent and omnipresent work going for him, how badly would you really need an EP-length mostly-instrumental mix of his, especially so soon after last month's fantastic Israeli Salad? I mean, yeah, it's got a coloring-book cover if you're into that kind of novelty (drawn by Nick Gazin, the guy behind the Run the Jewels artwork), but otherwise we're not hurting for Alchemist releases. Still, getting a little slice more is fine, really. What with being put out on his own odds-and-ends-heavy label and having a pretty low-stakes whateverish feel to it, Retarded Alligator Beats is a fun diversion that feels like it was made in an afternoon, not out of some kind of first-draft laziness, but because Alchemist's gotten to the point where the trip from inspiration to production feels more-or-less instantaneous.
