AWOL One and Daddy Kev

Mush Records continues its head-scratching trajectory with Slanguage, a uniquely odd document from L.A.'s hip-hop underground. These dudes -- fixtures on the city's thriving subterranean scene -- must've followed Spacemen 3's ethos of taking drugs to make music for people to take drugs to, because Slanguage is a devious derangement of hip-hop's usual tropes.

AWOL One's voice is a sandpapery drawl cured by heroic doses of weed and Doritos. Against the odds, his free-associating and shaky forays into singing are more endearing than embarrassing. Daddy Kev crafts hazy, subtly psychedelic tracks that embrace jazz's weirdest fringes, but for every exhibitionistic Rashied Ali trap-kit blowout, he includes boom-bapping funk beats. D-Styles (Invisibl Skratch Piklz) adds otherworldly FX on turntables, extending Slanguage deeper into druggy bizarreness. Whereas the Native Tongues' clique fashioned jazz samples to fairly linear ends, Daddy Kev places his avant-jazz and straight-up hip-hop elements in parallel worlds and somehow makes the incongruities cohere. Sometimes fuckin' normalcy gets to ya, ya know?, AWOL One slurs on "Start Your Road Trip Now," but Slanguage's rampant strangeness renders normalcy a distant possibility.