Elucid / Sebb Bash: I Guess U Had to Be There Album Review

While everyone in the Backwoodz Studioz orbit is unorthodox in some way, ELUCID actively pursues the avant-garde. He might rap like the rent’s due, croon like a bluesman, or chant about his Zionist landlord. The drums might knock and rattle or sound like they were dunked in the subterranean oceans of Titan. He’s released several longform one-track collages—most recently 2024’s Interference Pattern—that shun basic song structure; the murky arrangements of raps, field recordings, and samples have no clear start or end.

Like ELUCID, producer Sebb Bash is a rap-raised tinkerer eager to expand the borders of the genre and his own sound. The former DJ has roots in the Rawkus Records heyday when he scratched on tracks by Big L and High and Mighty. He’s also got ties to the Alchemist extended universe, boasting placements with Evidence, Big Noyd, Infamous Mobb, and Al himself. His older production mostly stuck to a boom-bap template of chopped loops and hard drums, but in recent years he’s absconded from the grid. “Switchboard,” which he produced for Armand Hammer’s We Buy Diabetic Test Strips, was a thunderhead of a beat: staticky, weightless, slightly menacing, with drums faint as apparitions.

On I Guess U Had to Be There, Elucid and Bash dial back the experimentation in favor of a more controlled approach. But even in this restrained mode, they still get busy. The duo previously worked together on 2022’s I Told Bessie, on which Bash produced two tracks. Those songs both ended with squalls of noise, hinting at Bash’s interest in more uncouth arrangements. Handling all the beats, he threads the noise more consistently throughout the production this time, filling the songs with odd effects, warped vocal samples, and jagged loops that give songs odd pockets and rickety rhythms. Single “Coonspeak” is built around creaky string strums and a shrill whistle that are bookended by what sounds like a clip of a boxing coach discussing technique: “Get the nigga’s head/The body follow,” the disembodied voice repeats. The rhythm created by the voice and the instruments is richly unsettling.

Bash emphasizes immersion and texture more than tension, so much so that his beat switches, of which there are several, tend to be understated. On “The Lorax,” the drums and a sharp drone drop away after a billy woods verse, and the song seems to wind down into an interlude. But then ELUCID steps in and the song continues without drums, slowly building to the slow return of the drone. There’s so much stitching already happening from measure to measure that Bash seems to see little value in making a spectacle of the transitions.

ELUCID takes a similar tack. This project is more rap-forward than 2024’s REVELATOR, on which he sang and mumbled and shouted. His writing here is associative and nonlinear, not quite random but devoid of explicit plot or theme. He begins “First Light” with the declaration, “I’m on farmer time,” then slinks through unrelated metaphors, flexes, and images that slowly build into a tribute to imagination and domesticity. There’s just one foothold in the torrent: ”My morning starts in service,” a reference to getting up early to prepare his kids for the day. If you miss it, you have to figure it out yourself, which seems to be the point. ELUCID doesn’t obfuscate, but he doesn’t chaperone either.