Kail: True Hollywood Squares

Alpha Pup has themselves some massive crossover hit potential with the debut album from South Central LA’s Kail. The beats bestowed upon him are obscure enough to satisfy all of those fickle hipsters – with Sober sampling the likes of Lalo Schifrin’s theme to Steven McQueen’s Bullitt and someone named N/A reconstituting an instrumental out of the Gemini Man stage of Megaman 3 – while pumping all the boom-bap and big bass to keep the party heads rocking. Lyrically, he spins tales of Tinseltown dregs into a rough concept album based around Hollywood Squares, of which a racially charged game is played throughout with Kail doing his best Dave Chappelle. He provides purposefully bad British, Italian, and Caucasian American accents in character that hit as much as they miss (Dave’s not here, man). All the talk of bitches and blunts will satisfy the NWA fans, while his obvious sense of humor often works well enough in a De La Soul or Biz Markie vein. On top of that, frequent AWOL One collaborator Daddy Kev mixed and mastered the affair, while also filling out the production. All that should see Kail join the likes of MF Doom and Dangermouse on the outskirts of the mainstream, if all goes to destiny.