Tuesday, July 7, 2015

Doc Waffles: This Week In Baseball

"Gentlemen....let's broaden our mind..."

Newness from Doc Waffles: This Week In Baseball



A new Doc Waffles album is an event. It's a happening, a strangely transcending happening...

Put the headphones on, kid, and just relax. Let it sink in. Let it twist up your thoughts. Let it happen. Take a dive and swim through some old highlight footage, some frayed baseball cards...some squashed, sticky cardboard formerly housing some microwaveable dinner items... All in all, you'll find some shreds of existential illumination ...



Every third word outta the rap bard's mouth excites a singular synapse in the brain, a flurry of sensory descriptors flair into vivid life as his slip-slidey shuffle-style vocals spill over you, an abstract sandwiching of sounds, smells and sights, foggy memories and strange triggerings of coulda-sworn-I-was-there deja-vu... "The hypothetical drugs that they give to the kangaroos...if you see a real penguin on tv, eat a gummy one..."

It's signature motifs and themes persist here...as any great autuer would continue throughout a canon of work...

  • Half-dreary/half-inspirational trips down Golfview Drive persists...
    ....as do the VHS tapes of hockey tapes.
  • Hot Pockets are a new specter slipping in and out of the verses of each track.
  • OH... and where else are you going to be reminded of those Alan Ford dealership commercials with the cartoon cowboy and his dog?
  • ...and transition right into a song that sings about the Mona Lisa, the history of surrealist painting and eating sushi in your swimsuits...?
  • He's also still on about stealing all the shoes (but not, this time, at the party...) No, he's visiting the Bastille at one instance and then he's conjuring Hulk Hogan and NES Duck Hunt seven seconds later...
  • Shouts outward to the #CoOwnaz collective, as well... 


It's a trip. An event... It's a rap album like an ayahuasca trip is just a stroll through the park. It's a thought-experiment, a word-thundering gaze inward into a soul you'd only slowly start to recognize as your own...

Is it? Wait...



The production (by Eddie Logix) seems to know just what it wants, not anything banging, not anything overly psychedelic, nothing derivative of old soul ballads or funk riffs, nothing contrived...something transcendent, atmospheric, lucid... GROOVY... With the edges fraying together, the vocals samples fuzzed and falling together like fine syrup, the beats arrest a meditative pulse and it accommodates the flexible mindset necessary to lily-pad leap from one symbol to the next, affixing to Doc's inherently wayward word-wanderings....(and wonderings)...

From the fine and to the filth, the high-minded and the low-lying, the aristocratic and the Saturday morning cartoons, the wine and the laughing gas and the bottles in your backseat, half-filled with the essence of summer...

http://docwaffles.bandcamp.com/ 
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