Edan Portnoy is a skinny white boy with a mop of curly hair and a mouth full of brass tacks. Beauty & The Beat is his second proper album (not including a handful of mixtapes), and he quickly makes good on the promise he showed on Primitive Plus. "Funky Voltron" is a cut-and-paste sockhop jam for skinny-jeans b-boys with the shiny sneakers, and from here on out it's pure psychedelic witchcraft, climaxing with the stoned freak-out pastiche of "Rock and Roll" and coming down gently with the scratchy samba of "Promised Land".
Is it hip-hop? Sure it is. Psychedelic-samba-funk-soul addled by synths and some outrageous boasts ("Somebody throws a baby! Oh shit! Do a spinning move and catch it and the crowd goes crazy!") The production is slinky and stanky and guaranteed to give stingy audiophiles arrhythmia, and the rhymes are so maddening and eccentric it's equally likely to make De La Soul or William Blake sound pedantic. Dig this funky shit.
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