Danny Brown’s teeth once looked like a cursed mountain range, his hair getting up from his scalp as if it had somewhere to suddenly be. Both are now smartened up for his first new music in three years, to the point where you might buy a car or sofa from him, but the tracks themselves thankfully still give off a malodorous stank.
The Detroit rapper has cultivated, in terms of pure sonics, one of the greatest ever voices in hip-hop: his larynx seems to have its own personality disorder, one minute a gruff sage, the next a raunchy yowling tomcat. The opening track, Change Up, is in the former mode: Brown, with the “mind of a master, blood of a slave”, laments a world where “stand-up niggas take shots to the knees”. But soon enough, his sap rises, eyes glint, and by track three he’s doing “the humpty hump in a Burger King bathroom”.
His metaphors – “I’m on par like Tiger with two white broads”, “The Henny got me wetter than whale piss” – are as good as his boasts: “I eat so many shrimp I got iodine poison / Hoes on my dick cos I look like Roy Orbison”, and both often have a microdose of surreality. On Belly of the Beast, its Paul White production whirling like a peyote-enhanced funfair, Brown gets frisky behind the waltzers, informing a woman: “If it smell like syrup, you gon’ get this work / But if it smell like perch, gotta disperse.” The solemnity he delivers this line with is extremely funny, and so many others – “Fucked a stripper for some change. Actual change” – are delivered with a standup comic’s perfect beats. Rappers often just ogle; Brown conjures the all-consuming idiot determination of being horny.
White’s three other productions are strong and Jpegmafia gives guest stars Run the Jewels a bulbous, stumbling backing for 3 Tearz, but it’s Q-Tip that makes the most crowd-pleasing beats: wonky jazz and soul that huffs the spirit of Beefheart. As a whole it’s slightly too laid back to match the masterpiece status of 2016’s Atrocity Exhibition, but Brown is still leaving encrusted marks on the hall of fame.
