If Young Scooter were holding in a sneeze, if Ralo stubbed his toe on a wall, if BabyDrill were electrocuted, they’d almost sound like Baby Mel. Harsh, screechy, and kinda hilarious, Mel’s dehydrated melodies and rampant volume shifts might, on the wrong day, resemble pig squeals more than rapping. You may feel inspired to write off the Montgomery, Alabama native as a gimmick in the same class as Baby Kia’s screamo-rap or 645AR’s squeak-sing, and I wouldn’t blame you. But unlike them, Mel never seems like he’s waiting for you to ask, How crazy is this guy? Instead he turns up the dial on Boosie-style shrillness, the rambly deliveries sometimes found on late-’90s No Limit albums, and the mumbled country blues of Rylo Rodriguez for a form of deeply Southern trap music that is both familiar and way out there—and only a little annoying.
EL CHITO, Mel’s second mixtape of the year, cranks up his strained-voice hustlenomics on top of beats that mash up multiple eras of trap production, from the heyday of Jeezy to post-Lex Luger Maybach Music tapes. A few of the instrumentals coast on mimicking popular sounds of the past, like “Trenches,” which has all the fixings of a Bankroll Fresh project (booming 808s, tinny hi-hats) except for the feeling that it was made by following a step-by-step YouTube tutorial. Better are the beats where you get the sense that the producer fell in love with a specific element of the vintage production style, such as the ominous Shawty Redd-esque synth on “Boyz 2 Men” or the brass-knuckled chants in the background of “Get Low” that call back to Three 6 Mafia’s brawl music.
As a whole, though, the beats work as triumphant mood-setters for Mel’s relentless barrage of rags-to-riches dope boy memories and Instagram caption-ready motivation rap. “The whole hood depending on me, I never stop,” he says on “My Pit,” with the trembling force of hitting a final rep on the bench press. He’s not the most scenic or descriptive lyricist, but his quick-twitch raps and vocal acrobatics occasionally give life to cliché lyrics and phrases. He’s so fired-up on “Find Exit Door” that his voice cracks, and if the intro feels raw and unfiltered, it’s just because he seems to be half-muttering whatever thoughts come to him on the fly. He gets away with not really saying much because his voice sounds distinct and cool.
But you could say the same thing about plenty of good rappers with one-of-a-kind voices, and this isn’t one of those hard-nosed Southern trap mixtapes where the lyrics are meant to make you feel the blood, sweat, and tears. It’s way sillier, even if that’s unintentional, considering that Baby Mel’s main takeaway from getting rich is that he can’t believe how much ass he’s getting. He opens “Ion Need Ya” by coughing like he’s having an asthma attack, then gets unusually quiet just to say, “I like the way she move it/I like the way she shake it.” He spots a woman so thick on “Aint My Fault” that he sounds like he needs an oxygen mask. On “Have My Child,” the best song on the tape, he’s practically howling with joy because girls want to make babies with him now. In another life, he’d probably still be using his jarring wail-rap to drop provocative and trendy drill, instead of this hard-to-categorize mutant collage of horny celebration trap. I can’t help but respect that choice even when he’s splitting my ears in half.
