Yessir, Whatever

With his high-pitched voice, his weird, smart-ass stance, and his preference to conversate with others rather than just rap, producer/rapper Madlib's alter-ego Quasimoto has always seemed the little-brother of the Parliament-Funkadelic character, Sir Nose D’Voidoffunk. Previous albums walked this character through a landscape of shrooms, weed, and chopped-up jazz-funk that were some of the most cherished beats in the Madlib catalog, and with these strange, mothership connections all strung together in a sensible style, this animated, snout-nosed smoker has some bona fide classics in his back catalog, making this merely good set look like a serious drop-off. Yessir Whatever suffers from being disjointed and a bit too much like a sketchbook, but the album is pulled together from 12 years of archival recordings, some of them previously released on rare comps and out-of-print vinyl. The bud smoker's anthem "Sparkdala" and the pro-weed, anti-money roller "Green Power" are both fully fleshed out highlights landing here in their original mixes, while the great B-side "Seasons Change" gets its proper home here, standing tall on the album level with its breezy, '60s-styled rumination on the passage of time. "Seasons Change" is also a prime example of the album's biggest frustration in that the rich cut is aggravatingly short, while many of the new cuts feel unfinished and chopped, offering fascinating grooves and complicated sonic landscapes that deserve more hang time. Bundle them together and things get real choppy. Still, Lord Quas started as a secret project where only friends received private tapes, so if Yessir Whatever seems too extra and too insider, it's totally within the project's spirit. Don't start here, but material-starved fans who have devoured earlier efforts will welcome this like a bag of scraggly "get-by" weed found during a drought.