Cadence Weapon’s first album Breaking Kayfabe, proved the beatmaker/MC otherwise known as Rollie Pemberton destined to tread his own path where everyone else would follow. His latest outing, Afterparty Babies, doesn’t derail that path, but it struggles to stay on course. An unfortunate side effect of positioning yourself as an outsider, your audience will expect you to get more weird, lest your otherness become sameness, even if just to yourself.

“House Music’ and “In Search of the Youth Crew’ has Pemberton twiddling with some of the obvious dance music norms that’ll satisfy any aficionados for club music, while “Limited Edition OJ Slammer’ and “True Story’ is laced with the bips and bleeps from the Atari 2600 and the original NES. But there’s no denying that CW has a penchant for changing up his steez between story telling and lyrics that don’t make sense, which results in a delivery that’s somewhere between Aesop Rock and Del the Funky Homosapien. “Rat Pack, Sammy Davis, Rap Pages, Betty Davis, Slab tray off the meat rack/Beat fact checkers need to take a fucking break, if you know what I mean, you know what I mean,” CW spits a cappella over his own “mmmbops” on “Do I Miss My Friends?” While the dude is barely legal as far as drinking age goes (well in the States that is), he’s got plenty of time to master his craft.

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