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.
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