C.R.A.C., The Piece Talks

You would be forgiven for not having anticipated a fertile middle ground between the faded-Polaroid soul-rap of J-Dilla and the hyperactive, construction-paper-and-kid-scissors pastiche of the Go! Team. But damned if newly formed duo C.R.A.C. Knuckles, consisting of Detroit producer Ta'Raach and rapper Blu, don't both stake out and mine this improbable ground on their first official release, The Piece Talks. Ta'Raach and Blu often seem to be vying for control of the record's direction, resulting in a series of delightfully vertiginous stylistic left turns.

The cheerfully silly and slight “Buy Me Lunch,” for instance, swipes an upbeat guitar shuffle from some lost psych-pop B-side and adds a childlike female vocalist and a few blips and bleeps borrowed from “Hey Ya” — and that's it. “Respect,” on the other hand, is straightforward East Coast hardcore, and could have come off of Hell On Earth (and indeed, young Prodigy's sampled voice elbows its way into the track halfway through). Blu is the old-school lyricist, delivering his writerly stanzas in a surly monotone that recalls Raekwon, while Ta'Raach is the pop-music dilettante who can't maintain the po'face required of '90s East Coast boom-bap for more than three minutes. As a result, the record feels half-finished in places and deeply schizophrenic almost everywhere else. But the unlikely duo always manage to transcend the sum of their individual parts, and on tracks like “Chill,” they discover a fascinating middle ground that probably neither of them knew existed.