The Knux

At some point in the late 1990s, hip-hop became weighed down by bling and, taking its cue from the diamonds that adorned the necks of most of its artists, grew harder and more polished. Electronic sounds further stretched the genre, but an orthodox mainstream was born and experimentation fell by the wayside. Eminem made a movie and then disappeared, Kanye West and Estelle bounced irresistibly delicious sounds back and forth from both sides of the Atlantic, but nothing really changed—nothing was really revolutionized. Hip-hop continued to sit quite comfortably in its own little groove.

The Knux’s debut album, “Remind Me in 3 Days…” doesn’t necessarily change all this, but it tries to. In the process, the album also introduces a new and ambitious kind of hipster hip-hop—a repackaging of techno, jazz, rock, dance, indie, and rap into one, complete with Gym Class Heroes’ cheekiness and the soulfulness of OutKast’s “Ms. Jackson.”

The Knux is a group made up of two brothers—called Al Millio and Krispy—who sound like a schizophrenic cross between OutKast, Gorillaz (when they laugh), and Juvenile. They have an eccentric whiff of the Strokes about them too, but it’s only when you think of all these artists at once that you come up with something close to the Knux. The duo’s more original sounds come from two distinct geographical flavors running beneath the surface of the album. The Knux show off both their past New Orleans roots and their present L.A. outlook in seductively smooth jazz interludes mingled with multilayered club beats and improvised piano segments that sit harmoniously with the jerky twangs of an electronic guitar.

The rapping itself isn’t as impressive as the new overall flavor of hip-hop, and sometimes the unnecessary crudeness of the lyrics actually detracts from the freshness of the background sounds. In other songs, the lyrics are simply nothing special: for example, “Cappuccino” begins with a chord that sounds like it’s from an 8-bit video game, something one would almost never expect from a hip-hop compilation, but the fact that they repeatedly sing, “I need a fresh cappuccino with a mocha twist / Fresh fresh cappuccino with a mocha twist” dampens the song’s overall impact. Tracks that have less rapping and more instrumental experimentation fare better, like the first song on the album, “The List.”

It doesn’t help that “Remind Me in 3 Days...” doesn’t have much of a theme or unifying style; in fact, it jumps immediately from a song about guns to another about a coffee high before ambling into a few songs featuring Lyrica Anderson’s vocals. The album seems to dip in the middle, with slower, more melodic and atmospheric songs, like “The Train” and “Shine Again,” but then the mood is broken by the tenth track, “Pea Knuckle,” a skit featuring a crass British drug dealer.

In most tracks, however, there are surprising moments when the instrumental sections evoke multiple genres of music at once, or when the interplay of background sounds (e.g. a hooting owl) and the sing-song rap become so completely enmeshed within a beat that it becomes easy to take for granted the novelty and multifaceted nature of the mix.

The Knux are not, by any means, the whole answer to the current state of hip-hop, which may not even need an answer at all. The most captivating parts of the Knux’s offerings are the beginnings and ends of songs—where guitar riffs wedge themselves comfortably alongside chords reminiscent of video game themes, or techno dance beats give way to arpeggios produced by a hand wandering aimlessly over a piano. If nothing else, the Knux show that the form, texture, and feel of rap and hip-hop—regardless of what is being said or sung—can venture as far as the land of hipster and further, beyond what anyone thought profitable or even sensible.

—Reviewer Jenny J. Lee can be reached at jhlee@fas.harvard.edu.