About a minute into Beware Beware Beware (More Lullabies), Quelle Chris’ new instrumental release, a distorted, inhuman voice emerges, repeating “Body after body after body” in a glassy-eyed timbre. Quelle deploys it again in the title track, this time taking a full minute to shift it from a muffled, druggy drone to an anxious squeak. At first, the voice sounds like a euphoria-numbed reveler bragging about their nonstop party lifestyle, the bodies like the writhing mass at the end of Society; as the pitch rises, the phrase reads more like a shock response to the fields of destruction that fill every screen. It’s unnerving. The beat roiling beneath is a trance-inducing Dr. John ritual, a circular rhythm of toms and handclaps that wrap around an ominous, ascending bassline. We’re locked in a doom loop, Quelle seems to say, living dopamine hit to dopamine hit.
Beware Beware Beware is a sequel to 2016’s similarly dark beat tape, Lullabies for the Broken Brain. Both are showcases for Quelle’s idiosyncratic production style, in which loping drum patterns and jagged samples combine into unintuitive grooves. Lullabies was an interior record, ruminating on internal spirals of loneliness; Beware is more outwardly focused. It’s a reaction to the shredding of the social contract that’s accelerated in recent years, a baggy-eyed document of what it’s like to live through collapse. Song titles like “What They Truly Fear Is What We Fear to Be” and “Be Afraid of Everything Trust No One” get the point across, and despite the warm tape saturation that blankets all 12 songs, Beware feels more like a crisis than a comfort.
The white-knuckle energy makes for a captivating listen. Taking cues from 2022’s DEATHFAME, his last solo rap record, Quelle burrows deeper into that album’s caked-on grit. Everything is hazy and backlit, as if experienced during a dissociative state. If you let your eyes glaze over, you’ll be swept away by the uncoiling Ethio-jazz of “Camouflage Cameras” and the smoky, broken beat cantor of “AI Hearts fka Walk Close to Me aka I Need Somebody.” The grooves lead all over the stylistic map: The processed vocals echoing through “Good Earth” carry shades of vaporwave; the disjointed chops and distant drums of “Again My Friend” recall the warped psychedelia of Dilla’s Donuts; “Money vs Passion” could pass for a brief interlude on one of Lonnie Liston Smith’s cosmic excursions.
