K-the-I??? & Kenny Segal — Genuine Dexterity (Backwoodz Studioz)

It was a pleasant surprise when the announcement came through that Billy Woods’ Backwoodz Studioz had a late-year release in store from Kiki Ceac and Kenny Segal. Anyone paying attention to hip-hop in the last 10 years well knows Segal’s name, most likely via Woods’ acclaimed Hiding Places and Maps. But anyone paying attention to hip-hop in the last 20 years will recognize Ceac’s peculiar K-the-I??? nom de plume from releases on Mush, Ninjatune and Big Dada. Memories are short in the rap game, though, so if anything, Genuine Dexterity serves as a welcome reintroduction to one of the finer artists working downstream from Def Jux’s late-1990s breakout.

Like others in the Backwoodz orbit, K-the-I??? has weathered the whims of hip-hop taste making over a timeline that’s taken him from Cambridge, Mass to L.A. to Chicago to Berlin and back again. He took a mid-2010s sabbatical from music altogether. As he noted in an illuminating interview with Caltrops Press over the summer, his writing has gone from paper and pen to freestyles on a phone that then get printed out so he can read them clearly from behind the mic. He’s a fan of Broadcast and Mach-Hommy alike. This is a dude who knows what it means to be older, wiser, more focused, less provincial.

It shows in the rhymes and rhythms of Genuine Dexterity. “Ionosphere” sets the album in motion as it will continue, and it’s clear right from the off that K has not come to play around — these rhymes are razor-sharp. One thing that’s always impressed me dating back to my first brush with him on 2006’s Broken Love Letter is the clarity of his vocal delivery for such high speeds of tongue-twisting spitting. If anything, what it conveys is a sense of engagement, that K is locked all the way in; you can get him rifling through his verses before pulling up the reins to make sure you notice how easily he says his mission statement: “I bet I can touch the sky so easily / even if you don’t believe in me.” Features from formidable emcees like ShrapKnel, Open Mike Eagle and Fatboi Sharif do nothing to deter this attentiveness.

For his own part, Segal aids and abets with some of his better recent beats. While K’s tearing the mic apart alongside both Woods and Armand Hammer compatriot Elucid on “Spellcasted Television,” Segal lays down a beat to match with scrawling guitar that weds spacey synths and claustrophobically dirty percussion; it recalls nothing so much as the best El-P productions. Vinyl crackle lines the sax-wailing, vibraphone-inflected “Warhammer.” More jazz sampling, this time featuring a busy bassline and more horns, hit on “Crushed Heavenly.” Rubber-band oscillations straight out of a 1950s sci-fi film drive the verses of “Season of the Sickness” before the bass weight hits for the chorus. A bubblingly bucolic, RJD2-esque downtempo tone colors “Immediate Imminent Immunity.” Together with K and company tying it all together, the album works as one despite its occasionally surprising sonic ventures.

There’s a loose union of antediluvian hip-hop vets out there — Run the Jewels, the Backwoodz crew, Open Mike, Roc Marciano, Shabazz Palaces, you know these names — that in recent years have found a modicum of fame while maintaining a respectable semblance of artistic integrity. With Genuine Dexterity, it’s safe to add K-the-I??? to that list. The game, as it turns out, needed him.

Patrick Masterson