Dr. Octagon

The Return of Dr. Octagon

(OCD International)

Record Review by Adam McKibbin

Almost everyone marvels aloud from time to time—usually to completely unimpressed company—that they have a million things on their minds and, oh God, how do they juggle it all?  Kool Keith is one of the rare types who’d actually be worth asking, “Oh yeah?  Like what kinds of stuff?”

He gives you a presumably incomplete but representative sample on The Return of Dr. Octagon, which marks the end of a hiatus for one of his more colorful and controversial alter egos.  The Good Doctor made his splash by wiping his ass on the Hippocratic oath on 1996’s sexually sinister Dr. Octagonecologyst (or perhaps he just had his own peculiarly twisted way of following the oath).  This time, he’s worried about dying trees, bodysnatching aliens, motherfuckers who sound like Al Green, and, like Dave Matthews before him, how humankind really behaves a lot like ants.

The album is front-loaded; after an opening skit about masturbating customer service representatives, “Trees” sends the record straight out to the dance floor, and “Ants” brings it back.  Both are funky and accessible, but hardly commercial; that seems to be the equation that best serves The Return of Dr. Octagon.  In the middle is the paranoid “Aliens,” which is built on a slow beat that eventually becomes possessed and takes off on a hyper-gallop.  Its accompanying video is frenetic, too, and is worth seeking out.

Production trio One Watt Sun had big shoes to fill; the decade since Dr. Octagonecologyst has been quite good to Dan the Automator, the producer whose career that album helped launch.  On that opening trifecta – “Trees,” “Aliens” and “Ants” – One Watt Sun proves their chemistry and capacity for innovation.  It doesn’t sound like much else out there.

The momentum isn’t sustained, though.  Toward the end of the album, the rug gets pulled out from the collaborators, as they hit a murky patch of formless beats and rather lifeless flow.  Fortunately, The Return of Dr. Octagon ends on another high note, with Princess Superstar dropping in to duet on “Eat It,” an anti-war song that, reliably, is a little different from the ones being done by Neil Young (“Should I serve my country or my cunt?” Princess Superstar asks, sounding perplexed).