Detroit's son of a shoemaker Quelle Chris once again teams up with producer Chris Keys for a sequel to their pivotal 2015 album, Innocent Country. Before 2015, Quelle was best known for slacker valorizing stories of drugs and dropping out; however, Innocent Country saw the young MC changing the temperature of his tunes and examining more introspective subject matter, such as depression, isolation, and learning to find the inner strength to persevere through life's inherent struggles. Now that depression is basically all any rapper his age rhymes about, Quelle has had to evolve again in order to stay at the forefront of the hip-hop heap. You probably wouldn't be reading this if you didn't think he was up to the task, and Innocent Country 2 is more than ready to prove you right, functioning as a modern update of the conscious rap idiom that reifies the wry, irreverence of his early work in order to repurpose his tendency towards irony to serve a higher purpose.
So you're probably wondering, "Where do I start with this one?" Well, I'm partial, and therefore bias towards the tracks with more traditional jazz-beats, the kind with tranquil, overlapping piano caresses that combine like honey and butter when layered over a popping woody beat and the singe of Quelle's low-key fry. So honestly, start at the obvious place, the first full track "Honest." It's going to take you through to the ivory anchored, street boxing, twirl of "Living Happy," and the spiritually fortified coruscate of "Sacred Safe." Innocent Country 2 is a much more positive and hopeful record than I'm used to hearing from Quelle, and his odd optimism shines through, not only on tracks like the culture validating "Black Twitter" and "Ritual," but also in how his brightness infects the attitude and bars of his collaborators, coaxing warm and amiable performances out of the likes of Homeboy Sandman and even Billy Woods. The presence of charming, mellow, vibed indie artists like Merrill Garbus definitely helps even out the precarity that I so often associate with Quelle's subject matter and rhymes, and she was a good pick as a contributor on this project.
Recursive themes of deprivation, bad choices, and life cycles that resemble being strapped to a catherine wheel do eventually surface on Innocent County 2, as they should. Life's blessings are often only what we can pick out from the rubble after a storm has passed, and the storms never seem to abate for more than a few days. Personal mistakes and compounding miscalculations are dealt with humorously on "Moments" featuring Josh Gondelman, and it does a fair job of waving off concerns about the coincidental denominator of all of our most devastating failures, that being, ourselves. But the real heart of the album may be "Herizons" where the glow of each day is seen as simply the turning of a wheel that only spins in place, never forward, never with momentum, simply turning in the air like trapeze artist between rings. The significance of a horizon that is meet without the advent of a new day is further grounded by a spoken word passage delivered by Big Sean at the end of "Mirage," when he states "security is an illusion" and encourages the listener to live with this knowledge and keep it close to their hearts. True, this is dismal, but it is also an unavoidable fact. The bedrock of your life is actually little more than a gumbo made of quicksand and broken concrete. Living with this knowledge doesn't mean that you shouldn't prepare for the future, in fact, it makes such preparations imperative. But rather this wisdom should relieve you of the fear of calamity, as calamity is inevitable, as is fear, pain, and humiliation. Learning to live without cowering before this certainty, mastering your dread and anxiety of it, is the only way to accept life for the adventure that it truly can be.
