The OF Tape Vol. 2

Odd Future

I listen to the Kevin and Bean Show on KROQ every day. I haven’t missed a show in years. In the time that I’ve been a listener they’ve had some really great interviews and some extremely poor ones. Earlier this week, they boldly scheduled Odd Future front man Tyler, the Creator and “idea man” L-Boy to be on the show to promote their new album The OF Tape Vol. 2 and tv show “Loiter Squad”. It was honestly one of the worst interviews I’ve heard, not just on Kevin & Bean, but in the history of life. And it was in no way Bean’s fault (Kevin was on vacation last week). He asked all the right questions that any good radio show host would ask a guest. Tyler and L-Boy just didn’t give a shit. They gave short, vague, and shitty answers to every question, showed very little enthusiasm and clearly had no interest in promoting neither their album nor their tv show.

But that is the very nature of Odd Future in a nutshell. They don’t care what anyone thinks or who they offend. They make the music they want to make and tell everyone else to fuck off. If anything, you can’t blame Odd Future for being inconsistent because this nonchalance is evident in The OF Tape Vol. 2, in which Tyler, the Creator serves as executive producer. This collective has been together for about 5 years. In that span, they’ve released hundreds of tracks individually and three mixtapes. Though this is their first official album, it feels more like another mixtape that is typical of what they’ve previously released.

That’s not to say this is a great record, but more of a consistent record. It starts off with “Bitches” with Hodgy Beats and Domo Genesis spitting rhymes and proving they have better chemistry than any of Odd Future’s other collaborators.  Match that with an extremely catchy/synthy beat and you get one of the album’s highlights. From there, we get a plethora of different songs including “Ya Know” and “White”, the former featuring the electro inspired The Internet and the former being a soulful R&B interlude by Frank Ocean. These two tracks stand out from the rest of anything anyone else puts out in Odd Future because they are the only members of the collective that really transcend the genre of rap music. They feel very out of place, but are better songs than others on the album like “50”, “Lean” and “We Got Bitches”, though the latter song is anything you’d come to expect from the obnoxious side of Odd Future.

Where this album really shines is when they (especially Tyler) tackle pop culture headlines, like Sean Kingston’s jet skiing accident or Casey Anthony in “P” or graphically paint an image of Kermit the Frog and Miss Piggy having sex in “Hcapd”. The outro for the latter basically confirms my intro of what Odd Future stands for (side note: I watched “The Muppets” literally right before I decided to listen to this album. This song scarred my childhood). “Forest Green” is another great track that surprisingly appears here because it was released as a Mike G single a year ago, but still holds up with the album’s best chorus. But, no track shines brighter than “Oldie”, which features most of the Odd Future collective passing the mic one at a time, laying down their own verse. Toward the 7-minute mark of this 10-minute epic, we get a welcome surprise return from Earl Sweatshirt, the youngest member of Odd Future who was shipped off to boarding school in Samoa over a year ago. This is the only track on the album that captures the camaraderie of Odd Future and is further illustrated by the track’s video.

Though they pull no punches here, The OF Tape Vol. 2 delivers what you’d expect from Odd Future: brash, juvenile, yet oddly intriguing lyrics. A lot of this album seems like filler and could have been left out. And some songs are so brainless it sounds like a 13 year-old aspiring rapper wrote them. But, when the album shines, it does so on a level that shows how clever and talented these guys can really be. As Odd Future emerges from the underground and into the album-release game (they’ll never be considered mainstream - you win this one hipsters), one wonders how much longer their novelty will last.

Recommended Tracks: “Bitches”, “Forest Green”, “P”, “Hcapd”, “Oldie”