Holy Smokes

Recording information: Someohashipconnect.
Photographer: J. Malaika Beckford.
Arranger: Georgia Anne Muldrow.
On "E&R," left-field rapper -- and that's deep left-field -- Dudley Perkins looks around the room and notices "We gotta lotta fake people here this evening." "We gonna expose and remove" he continues, and then proceeds to chant down the walls of Babylon by calling out John McCain, Louis Farrakhan, Miss Cleo, and many others, all over a broken version of the George Clinton beat courtesy of the album's sole producer, Georgia Anne Muldrow. Besides these ghosts that the track exorcises Lee "Scratch" Perry-style, there isn't a lick of "fake" on Holy Smokes, an album that shares its release date with Muldrow's own Umsindo. Both are inaugural releases for the duo's own SomeOthaShip label and are accordingly free of outside influence, allowing Perkins to follow any of his ideas down the funky rabbit hole while letting the conspiracy theories fly, like on the apocalyptic "Chem Trails" ("Look ma/In the sky/They tryin' to kill us"). The skits and interludes are plentiful and, in the case of this free-flowing album, essential while falling into the categories of either far-out poems or terrifying political rants. Perkins' stream-of-consciousness lyrics are in overdrive and often nostalgic for the funky and boogie-filled slang of the '70s, but his unwillingness to connect is as firm as ever, something that's underlined twice when "Understandment" spits "If you can't understand this/This ain't for you." Holy Smokes is as strange and otherworldly as the Tokio Aoyama cover it sports, and when you add Muldrow's off-kilter funk as the base along with the decline of Western civilization as the inspiration, this could easily be considered Perkins' most difficult album to date. It's also his most rewarding, growing with every listen and revealing its secrets little by little. ~ David Jeffries