Sleazenation

• Text: Dan Stacy, Illustration: Jeff Jank
• Sleazenation
• July 01, 2000

He flips shapes and forms. He's the unseen. You won't see him coming but Lord Quas is set to blaze the West Coast up in a 'shroom cloud.

Plain and simple: De La Soul aside, Quasimoto has just dropped the best Hip-Hop album of the 2 triple zero. And he isn't even keeping it real, the weeded-out alter ego of Lootpack's Madlib just keeps it right. The Unseen is a scorched chocolate coated valley scattered with 'shrooms and smoker's debris that astro-travels way beyond the unchartered hinterlands of Hip-Hop, not unlike De La's 3 Feet High And Rising once did.

Beautifully paced beats switch at will throughout each song and are fused seamlessly with the extraordinary melodies skooled into a young Madlib by his uncle, Jazz musician Jon Faddis.

"My uncle played with Dizzy Gillespie and all of them. He skooled me on Jazz music when I was young so I'm bringing it back to heads who maybe don't know real Jazz, a new range they can go look up."

Nowhere is this more apparent than on Jazz Cats Pt. 1, an updated and blunted homage similar in deed to Gangstarr's Jazz Thing. What sets it apart from anything else you've heard before are the helium powered vocals of Lord Quas. Question Madlib on these speed stunts however and a strange form of denial follows: "That's the regular Quas voice. I found him off a bad trip and we both exist in the same body. Basically I got real high, bugged out and out came Quas. He's already blown up in outer space, now I gotta try and do the same on earth."

If that star-speak sounds familiar, don't be perturbed. Quasimoto isn't a presence who exudes the same nonsense qualities of Kool Keith or guzzles the same drugs as Eminem. He's a brand new hallucinationinduced alien pervert at the top of his game with the funniest and funkiest record you'll hear all year. Unlike this summer's other major extra-terrestrial encounter, John Travolta's scientology tinged Battlefield Earth, The Unseen doesn't need subliminal messages to recruit new members. Go buy now fool!