Kassa Overall’s music is a modern, often jarring synthesis of hip-hop and jazz. Overall is adept as both a rapper and jazz drummer, and the Seattle-based musician’s third album, Animals, features a bevy of underground hip-hop legends (Danny Brown, Lil B, Shabazz Palaces) and jazz musicians (including pianist Vijay Iyer and trumpet player Theo Croker).
While Overall looked back on his past struggles with mental health on 2020’s I Think I’m Good, including a hospitalization during college, Animals is filled with unease about the objectification that comes with success in the music industry. “Ready to Ball,” for one, addresses the lure of materialism, as Overall’s malleable voice is sped up and slowed down, suggesting an alternate persona: “If he got more than me, I might have to make him bleed.”
The song structures on Animals are often chaotic. “Still Ain’t Find Me” mixes Latin rhythms and free jazz, as saxophones squeal over congas, while the otherwise hushed “The Lava Is Calm” is interrupted by a noisy guitar solo before returning to a more chill mood. These songs constantly change shape, which makes even the mellowest moments sound like the calm before a storm.
Overall mixes acoustic instruments with electronic processing throughout, creating an amalgam that defies easy categorization. The lush string arrangements of “So Happy” and “Maybe We Can Stay” add warmth to songs that are steeped in anxiety. And “Clock Ticking” nods to ’90s boom bap with an emphasis on negative space, with almost no instrumentation aside from percussion.
Although attempts to fuse jazz and hip-hop date back to the ’80s, Overall’s version is uniquely personal and impassioned, locating new musical forms for the struggles that his lyrics describe. Rather than cutting and pasting samples and calling it a day, he skillfully weaves them together with improvisational live instrumentation. With Animals, analog and electronic, and past and present, are placed in an engaging dialogue.
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