K.O. Strat feeds your head with his sharp ’n’ tasty new album Glass Sandwich — showcasing today on Tinnitist.
Good hip-hop lives and dies on the cleverness of its wordplay. But when it comes to witty namechecks, Thornhill, Ont., rapper Strat is playing in a different league. On his debut album Glass Sandwich — and its spotlight track The Moleskine — he’s dropping pop-cultural nods so deep you can’t see the bottom of them.
A short, sweet peek into a restless creative mind, The Moleskine packs its two-minute running time with references to The Legend of Sleepy Hollow, The Flintstones, Tekken, Metallica’s first album and the Space Shuttle Challenger. Even the title is an IP: It’s the brand name of the notebook Strat used to jot down his lyrical ideas and bursts of inspiration. “My close friend had gotten me a grossly overpriced but undeniably nice Moleskine notebook as a gift. If he hadn’t, the song might be called The Hilroy,” he muses.
All of those lyrical footnotes are in the service of an unabashedly boastful paean to the skill with which Strat hits on his ideas and brings them to the mic. As with most of his material, the aim of The Moleskine is to combine a freewheeling flow of flexes with geekisms — all tossed off so much subtlety and technique that you almost don’t notice how nerdy they are. “Sleight-of-hand rap,” he calls it.
On a musical level, the song basically qualifies as an extended callback of its own. It’s a breezy, finger-snapping ditty with a sampled acoustic bassline and melodic layers that create what Strat calls “almost a cheat code to appeal to fans of A Tribe Called Quest, Digable Planets, and other early-’90s jazz-sample-heavy artists.”
A host of such pleasures await on the rest of the album, a self-produced compilation of singles from the past four years, bookended by two new tracks. Now that he’s entered what he’s calling Phase II of his career, the time seemed ripe to issue a musical refresher course that could sum up Phase I while clearing the decks for a deluge of new material he says is coming.
In the meantime, prepare to be dazzled and confounded. Glass Sandwich is loaded with brain-teasing mentions, namedropping everything and everyone from Can-rock band Max Webster, Cloris Leachman’s Frau Blücher from Young Frankenstein and blues icon Howlin’ Wolf to pro wrestling, Italian horror movies, Led Zeppelin’s concert flick The Song Remains The Same and what Strat calls “more things that only a limited number of people would understand — and how many of them would listen to hip-hop? One of the hallmarks of my music is that I don’t care in the slightest if someone understands what I’m talking about.” Give yourself a point if you recognize the album title as being inspired by a Primus song, and the cover art as a mashup of Frank Zappa’s Weasels Ripped My Flesh and the silent classic Nosferatu.
Check out The Moleskine above, hear the rest of Glass Sandwich below, and keep up with K.O. Strat on his website and Instagram.
