MM..FOOD

Album review

Five years after Operation: Doomsday gave the former Zev Love X the first crowning achievement of his career reinvention, MF DOOM spent 2004 carpet bombing hip-hop with cult classics. Between the delayed-to-perfection Madlib collab Madvillainy, the raw spitting of his alter ego's-alter ego Viktor Vaughn on (VV:2) Venomous Villain, and a classic entry in his seemingly limitless catalog of instrumental beat tapes (Special Herbs, Vols. 7 & 8), he would've had a year to remember as both a rapper and a producer even if the official Doomsday follow-up wasn't in the mix. But MM..Food still stood out amidst all this as a unified showcase of his idiosyncratic yet deep-focused comedic perception on the mic and the sampler alike. Since it was already becoming well-known just how singularly creative he was as an artist, finding undiscovered angles to once-familiar truisms and cliches and common language both lyrically and beatwise, this conceptual album feels like a rare and odd "one for the fans" efforts that still proves to be an easy route to make new ones. Maybe it's because DOOM's both a bit more vulnerable and a bit more exasperated than previous, which complements his punchline-driven storytelling in expectation-ruining ways. As his grocery list checks off social-anxiety distrust among peers ("Deep Fried Frenz"), the hole in his heart left by the death of his brother Subroc ("Kon Karne"), and a borderline-mortifying look into the frustrations of self-pleasure ("Kookies"), the laugh-to-keep-from-crying undercurrents are hard to miss. Yet it's still an album with no shortage of joy, humor, and trickster-god absurdity—not as lighthearted as it might seem on first listen, but still driven by the kind of linguistic play that sparks awed laughter. There's plenty of that to be found in Madvillainy cast-off turned beloved career highlight "One Beer" (a legendary beat in Madlib's portfolio), and there are other welcome guests in enigmatic yet razor-tongued guest spots from seldom-heard mystery collaborators Mr. Fantastik ("Rapp Snitch Knishes") and Angelika ("Guinnesses"). A suite of mid-album sound collage tracks (from "Poo-Putt Platter" to "Fig Leaf Bi-Carbonate") play up DOOM's ingenuity as a producer, too—stitching together found-media dialogue into hood-scholar narratives as slyly subversive as the ones he wrote himself. And his soul-jazz beats sink in deep, even in the absence of his voice's casually agile internal-rhyme mastery. © Nate Patrin/Qobuz