KDIV

Album review

In a long hip-hop tradition of surreal alter-egos ranging from Shock G's Humpty Hump to the MF DOOM extended universe, Serengeti's Kenny Dennis stands out as one of the strangest. Since the emergence of the character on 2006’s Dennehy, Kenny's evolved from a broad yet engagingly credible everyman caricature of The Most Chicago Being Alive to a sort of tragicomic coulda-been-somebody raconteur—a classic schlub with a tendency towards mercurial fixations, lingering grudges, and hairbrained schemes. (Think the abstract-yet-vivid storytelling of peak Ghostface put to use describing the kind of guy Joel and Ethan Coen would've made one of their more lighthearted films about.) KDIV isn't technically the fourth entry into his saga—the Ajai albums and a litany of side projects and EPs detail an increasingly complicated cosmology around the character—but it's one of the most unusual ones in that it portrays the culmination of a man hurtling towards retirement age in the midst of something more than just a midlife crisis (though his adopting the fashion sense of a 20-something hypebeast does factor in). IV sees Kenny as a transplant to Minnesota who's been living in denial over the fact that his significant other Jules—a recurring romantic partner and foil from the beginning—was declared dead in a 1993 South America plane crash. Kenny has been talking as though she's alive and with him all this time. That puts a bit of a dark twist on Serengeti's tendency to bring up lyrical fixations and recurring phrases that stick in your head like mellifluous running jokes—Louboutin, giardiniera, the Pontiac Fiero, the year 1987—because it also starts to sound like part of his delusional coping mechanisms. If that sounds a bit tragic and a bit dark-humored at the same time, it is.  However, Serengeti's deep attention to idiosyncratic but deeply resonant details builds a world that, with an outsider-perspective assist from comedian Anders Holm as a recurring narrator/friend, feels too lived-in to be flippant about it. The production's balance of lo-fi hauntology and classic soul-loop headnod material backs that up, with regular collaborators like Andrew Broder and Kenny Segal joined by lesser-known lifers Open I and Thrifty—and Sufjan Stevens, who lays down the ambient melancholy for Holm’s bewildered-sounding interstitial skits. © Nate Patrin/Qobuz