Equally adept as a jazz drummer, rapper, and producer, Seattle's Kassa Overall makes records whose approach to musical modernism is informed amply by beat consciousness. Animals, his third album and Warp debut, is a logical next step from 2020's I Think I'm Good, a complex, startling jazz-hop treatise on struggles with mental illness. Overall surrounds himself here with a wily cast of players, rappers, and singers relentlessly combining electronic and organic beats, many guest performances, and a killer production instinct.Dozens of recorded efforts combining hip-hop and jazz have appeared over the last three decades. Overall's take is quite intimate and personal, as confessional as it is culturally analytical and emotionally resonant. Given that his lyrics frame individual struggles as microcosms of collective struggle, he needed to discover his own method for combining the musics he loves in depicting his inner process in sound. To that end, Overall's constructions serve to complement, buoy, and accentuate live instrumentation and improvisation. Ultimately, Animals is a compelling conversation between the creator and his psyche, his musicians, and listeners.
