As cold and insular as his sound is, Xang still leaves room for levity. “forehead up” is as brisk as it is spooky, and the cheery violin flourishes from Twista’s “Overnight Celebrity” turn “hangman” into a bright spot. Sometimes Xang’s creepy backing melodies remind me of being a kid singing into an electric fan. Other times his marble-mouthed delivery steamrolls over funny (albeit bleak) asides. “Cuh got hit in his head/Fuck I look like fighting?” he goads on “cake got baked.” When he has more drugs than he knows what to do with, he pictures his opps in disbelief: “How the hell lil Xang keep scorin’ them scripts?/He trippin’.” WOMB is a concise record, just 20 minutes long, but its layers of muck and grime make additional listens feel like coal mining—here’s a searing snare roll in one corner, a punchy one-liner in another. On “bruce wayne,” Xang cuts through smog with a scythe: the pitched-down moans, quaking bass, and spurts of processed strings all form one heavy mist. Each repetition feels denser than the last.
Xang’s ability to cultivate chilling atmosphere has as much to do with his voice as his production choices; he burrows into the mix and lets his punch-ins bleed into each other, rapping like his teeth are clenched tight. It works on “by myself” and “bruce wayne,” where he appears like an undead spirit who’ll jugg you for everything in your pockets. The catch is how hard it can be to hear what he’s getting across—on “ricky rubio,” his delivery is so vaporous it’s nearly impossible to decipher. When Xang disappears in the fog of the production, he starts to lose his appeal; the more precise and forthright he is with his vocals, like on “cake got baked,” the better. Without abandoning the mise-en-scène, I wanna hear him emphasize what he’s really saying.
Regardless, if Watch Over My Body serves as a breakthrough for DPM’s avant-garde rap portraiture, the genre will be better for it. “notice” closes the tape with that Cortex sample you’ve probably heard before, but producer balenci02’s rumbling 808s, doomsday bells, and elliptical synths give Xang room to make it his own. A standard often flipped with bong rips and kickbacks in mind feels newly calamitous, and Xang replaces the tight-lipped malaise with hardnosed zeal. He’s possessed and invigorated, rapping like he’s barreling down the highway in a 16-wheeler: The windows are down, the engine purrs, and it’s hard to make out his words as the wind whips past, but you could get drunk off the adrenaline.
