Posted on 09/20/2005

 

"You're a stranger, strangers don't talk to strangers."
If I followed Omni's own advice, I would've missed out on his third solo album, Ballyhoo. But you're talking to a man who once played rock-paper-scissors for three hours in an apartment full of unfamiliar, non-English speaking Chinese immigrants just for irony's sake. So naturally, I dove headfirst into this paranoid, clanking beast of an LP. Ballyhoo is supposed to be a journey into Omni's mind. But it's also like an excursion into to a weird corner of the LA Underground, where virtually everyone spits with low, partially on-beat flows about partying, police brutality, and ninja mongooses. Among the talents Omni's enlisted include Mikah Nine of Freestyle Fellowship, Wildchild of the LootPack, and Fatlip, all of whom compliment Omni's deep monotone delivery and diverse set of rhyme topics.

Early on, listeners are given a taste of the dark side of Omni, a clutch of songs that, with their menacing ambience and vaguely mechanical feel, could easily double as a soundtrack for a Terminator movie or an IMAX film on deep space. The highlight of this opening set of tracks is "Daily Hustle", an industrial-strength cut complete with rumbling bass and feverish background chanting. Omni takes the loping, apocalyptic atmosphere and runs with it: "Don't ever catch me / I'm above the law / Beast in my own belly / I do the work of God / what the police and ‘em go'n tell me?" Over the album's first three tracks, Omni's as big and fearsome as his backing beats, portraying himself as a lyrical monster willing to rip cities apart.

This larger-than-life posturing complete, Omni takes a hard turn into lighter fare. Much to his credit, he makes the transition from Terminator to struggling artist easily, pouring out some frustration over the laid-back "Feel How I Feel". After all this destruction and self-reflection, he can still put his cares to the side, sounding perfectly at home alongside guests Molman and Milx on the super-smooth party-tinged "Coca Cola".

While "Coca Cola" is no doubt one of the strongest tracks on the album, it's just an entrée to the heights of Ballyhoo, the enormous, exotic tracks "Cheeba Remix" and "Keep It Cool". On the first (a souped-up remix of "Cheeba" from his first LP, Funkdafied Freddy), Omni plays the seducer over mysterious flutes and sitars while an unbelievably rhythmic drum track works up a frenzy in the background. "Cheeba Remix" typifies the bass-heavy energy of Ballyhoo, but "Keep It Cool" captures the epic size of its beats. After a brief ambient interlude, "Keep It Cool" opens into a space that seems as big as the universe itself. The sense of size and distance isn't just a neat audio effect—it suggests the real separation between Omni and the coy female singer on the hook.

As compelling (and complementary) as these two tracks are, they're separated by the hulking "Madman", a well-produced but unnecessary entry. After the album's momentum is broken by an unfortunate sequencing decision, Ballyhoo rumbles to a mixed close. "Strangers" is a truly disturbing, but vivid track, with Omni indulging in a bit of noir storytelling ("chain-smoking ‘til my feet soaked in black ashes") over an amazing, dark beat. A nice song in isolation, but it would have fit better in the album's opening third, rather than sandwiched between the sedate "Never" and the goofy "Smoke With Me".

Ballyhoo is one of the most unpredictable and best produced albums of the year, with a horde of ridiculously bass-heavy, trippy beats. While the production is always top notch, the album itself suffers from sequencing that makes Omni's schizophrenic spitting less acceptable. Ideally, Ballyhoo would have been released as two shorter EPs, a seven-track "dark" disc and a four-track "light" disc; instead, all these elements have been mixed-up into a single album that doesn't hang together as well as it could. All of this assumes, however, that listeners find Omni's baritone appealing, which isn't always the case. For every two tracks where Omni sounds smooth and on-point, there's another where he comes-off slow and robotic.

Ballyhoo is disorganized and conflicted, but never boring and always strange. In well under an hour, Omni manages to create a massive, chaotic world that can be intriguing to get lost in. Just watch out for all the shape-shifters and ninja mongooses running around.