Oddateee: Halfway Homeless

From listening to Halfway Homeless, you would think rapper Oddateee’s homebase of Union City, New Jersey was a city manifested in the spirit of the South Bronx albeit reconfigured to fit some kind of Timothy Leary-esque vision of a hallucinogenic hip-hop utopia. As producer Dalek keeps the pace of the beats at a surreal and trippy pace with fuzzed out riddims and squalls of noise akin to a crunked-out Sonic Youth, Oddateee harbors lofty aspirations of achieving commercial success , as tracks like “Crack Rock” and the electro-fied “Ricans”. This push-pull duality makes for some very interesting moments on Halfway Homeless, which might not offer any direct threats to the Black Eyed Peas’ reign on the charts anytime soon, but can relish in its unique stance amongst the most original recordings hip-hop has seen in recent memory.