I blame only myself and maybe Shea Serrano for not putting us up on the The Outfit, TX sooner. The latter is the foremost chronicler of Houston rap and I like to think of myself as the kind of guy who would sense the disturbance in the force created from an album called, The Ballad of Percy Shalamar. But that was last year. This year, The Outfit have returned with Starships & Rockets: Cooly Fooly Space Age Funk, graciously brought to my attention via POTW contributor, Alex Piyevski.
You can learn a lot from an album title when it contains 89 syllables. I don’t know much about their The Outfit’s biography, but I know that they obviously don’t read blogs or else they would’ve realized that G-Side already used that album title a few years back. This is a good thing — rappers aren’t supposed to be refreshing their RSS feed, they’re supposed to be living life, creating music, and preferably smoking acres of weed to give them them the proper “I Don’t Know What.” What draws me most in is the Space Age Funk.
You might expect the usual touchstones of a futuristic funk-influenced group from Houston. There’s the influence of Screw, Dungeon Family, Rap-A-Lot, lean, and a sluggish neon psychedelia. Neither rapper really asserts their personality to Outkast levels, but they both have presence, chemistry, and a gift for fitting into the wide open spaces of the grooves. They describe it as “a guided tour de funk through TOFT’s unique sonic brand of “Cooly Fooly Space Age Funk”…taking listeners into outer space in the passenger seat of an ’84 Biarritz, with the slant-back ass.”
Highly recommended if you like K.R.I.T, ADD+, martian deserts or dessert blunts.It’s trippy and then some.
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