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Sep 20, 2011"Come to our shows and they're clapping again/Thank you my friends" isn't sarcastic, which doesn't mean it's devoid of irony or should be. "There's a brand new dance/Give us all your money/Everybody love everybody" is sarcastic.
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Sep 14, 2011They're deceptively laid-back satirists who deliver their smackdowns amid da-da streams of consciousness, sometimes with such subtlety that by the time the joke finally registers they're off on a fresh, equally strange and frequently hilarious tangent.
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Sep 13, 2011Relax is Das Racist's first commercial release, yet it shares the dense sprawl and uncomfortable laughs of the group's previous Internet mixtapes.
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Sep 23, 2011Heems and Kool A.D. might be deconstructing rap for the purposes of delivering ingenious and challenging verses, but Relax is one of the best capital R rap albums out this year.
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Sep 21, 2011The dead air that seemed to sometimes crop up previously has been filled or chopped out completely, creating a record with taut and purposeful momentum.
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Sep 20, 2011A joke band that isn't really a joke band, Das Racist makes a serious impression on its debut full-length, Relax.
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Oct 17, 2011Das Racist takes the strengths off their mixtapes and simply take them on a new adventure with Relax.
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Sep 30, 2011Granted, they're not fishing for another viral earworm here, but you'd think they could come up with something better -- for the lead single, no less -- than "Michael Jackson"'s feeble placeholder of a refrain.
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Sep 28, 2011Their unique perspectives on racial and class identities are perspectives that hip-hop needs to remain vital, to remain that genre that united so many other groups throughout the genre's dominating decades. And the best part is that they fulfill that role while still joking.
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Sep 15, 2011Despite the many highs, Relax is still a debut, and at times finds the group struggling with the specifics of their sound.
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Sep 9, 2011A motley crew of producers (Diplo, El-P, Rostam from Vampire Weekend, Drake affiliate Francis Farewell Starlite, one of the dudes from Yeasayer) serves up shinier, harder, louder, thornier beats, and our heroes occasionally respond in kind.
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Sep 12, 2011Often Patrick Wimberly's production renders their pop-cultural culling too literally.
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Sep 21, 2011At times, the free-association gets to be a bit much, but it's all held afloat by trampoline beats from a stud cast that includes the likes of Diplo and El-P, all channeling Magoo-era Timbaland, Kelis-era Neptunes, and Hov-era Panjabi MC.
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Oct 4, 2011It's a solid debut with some fantastic moments.
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Sep 28, 2011Considering the frequent, quickly turned-around, and mostly undercooked efforts of this very niche micro-genre, Relax is Das Racist's definitive album to date.
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Sep 12, 2011The trio's first official (i.e., for profit) LP has one-liners over beats from Diplo and El-P. Their political humor is, as they say, "dark like the rainbow in a Ronnie James Dio joint." But they also love dumb wordplay ("Don King playing Donkey Kong"), video games and girls whose hair smells like Newports.
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Oct 19, 2011What follows are a series of maybe-serious experiments that aren't much fun.
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Sep 20, 2011While they've made great use of deconstructive syntax, repetition, gibberish, and in-jokes in the past, too much of Relax simply feels like dead air.
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Sep 22, 2011The lyrics are bizarre ("I'm DJ Khaled / I'm a daikon radish") and confrontational ("RapGenius.com is white devil sophistry / Urban Dictionary is for demons with college degrees") but also cohesive and purposeful.
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Oct 3, 2011The production is inconsistent and largely a bit too bombastic for Das Racist's usually free-associative, untechnical rapping.
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Sep 30, 2011On Relax, Das Racist, at worst, deliver an album that tries too hard to sound like every other rap album out there.
User score distribution:
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Positive: 17 out of 19
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Mixed: 1 out of 19
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Negative: 1 out of 19
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Oct 9, 2011
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Sep 17, 2011
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Feb 7, 2017