DAS RACIST - Relax

When they burst onto the web scene in 2008 with a track called "Combination Pizza Hut And Taco Bell", few would have bet on them. "Joke Rap" was the label people gave them: college jokers having fun parodying a genre that took itself far too seriously, destined to soon go back to exams and cafeteria lines on campus. But they were wrong. Because "they" – Heems, Kool Ad and Dapwell, aka Das Racist – were still testing the waters, and that unhinged novelty was just the tip of a conceptual and musical iceberg that had been building since 2003, when the three first met, right there in the classroom. The considerable critical and commercial success earned by the two hefty mixtapes released the previous year ("Shut Up, Dude" and "Sit Down, Man") confirmed as much. That irresistible blend of minimalist, alternative rap, pop attitude, multiethnic dance music (two members are of Indian descent, the other Afro-Cuban) and situationist absurdity delivered with a pseudo-intellectual air won over even listeners unaccustomed to the quirks of the Brooklyn underground scene (proof being the 40,000 downloads of "Sit Down, Man" in a single week). Almost like Beastie Boys reincarnated for the i-music era.

Having finally arrived at their debut (a proper one, even in physical format) on the long-playing format, with "Relax" Das Racist don't stray from the winning recipe outlined above. Sure, the production here (overseen together with Patrick Wimberley of the electro-pop duo Chairlift) is more polished and calculated, and the weight of collaborations with Diplo, El-P, Rostam Batmanglij of Vampire Weekend and Arnald Wilder of Yeasayer (the first two having already guested on the second mixtape) is felt, but the trio's naive spirit, taste for flashy juxtapositions and sonic spontaneity emerge unscathed. Carried along by a lively, spicy, infectious flow – fairly traditional in its meter but acrobatic in its rhymes and wordplay – and by the ironic emphasis of the choruses, the album lets loose all its extroversion through the party-rap of tracks like "Girl" (80s robotic synths and Afro-tinged funk percussion), the pure novelty of "Booty In The Air", or "Middle Of The Cake", the Bollywood verve of standout singles like "Michael Jackson" or "Punjabi Song", and the bombastic, rocky physicality of "Selena".

But Das Racist also know how to shift tone and strike darker, more nuanced notes amid the vivid colours: the broken stride and arithmetic suspensions of "Power", the corrosive urban landscapes of El-P, both in front of and behind the mixing desk on "Shut Up Man", the abstract textures and elastic basslines of "Rainbow In The Dark". And even the less flashy tracks reveal, on repeated listens, happy, surprising touches: the shrill, Orientalist Auto-Tune of "Brand New Dance", the pitch-warped voices in a kind of wail tailing off the title track, the pointillist electro clapping of "Happy Rappy" (produced by Diplo), the Afro-pop and sparkling little keyboards of Vampire Weekend courtesy of Batmanglij on "The Trick". Das Racist seem to have found the magic formula for combining dancefloor appeal with indie provocation. And, joking around in their own way, they run a serious risk of ending up in the upper reaches of the hip-hop charts. More than deservedly so, in our view.

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21/09/2011