On “Paint Soup 3,” Two of Portland’s Trippiest Rappers Sketch Out Their Own Bizarro World

Paint Soup, Paint Soup 3: We Need Bread This Time (Self-Released)

[SURREAL WORLD] On their third collaborative album, outré Portland rappers Slick Devious and Old Grape God issue their mission statement in the form of a subverted Future brag: "Salvador Dali Lama/Fucking up some common sense." Keeping it surreal is the group's main prerogative, and on Paint Soup 3, the duo, along with producer Skelli Skel, seem to be broadcasting from their own corner of the Upside Down. Following nothing but their own streams of consciousness, the absurdist wordplay seems to flow from straight from their heads and onto the record, and the fun is just trying to keep up with their trains of thought. Indeed, it leads to some odd places—like Auto-Tuning the sounds of a dial-up modem, or flipping "Bawitdaba" into something that could work as a Missy Elliott hook—but everything is animated in such a way that it never becomes alienating or indulgent. While Devious switches between a sing-song croon and delivering El-P-style body-blows, Grape God flows like a lava lamp, stretching his voice around the beat rather than riding along with it. On his own projects, his free-jazz approach is often inscrutable, but here, Skel's dub-influenced production gives him more space to move around in. "I watch a lot of stand-up comedy and not a lot of battle rap, my apologies," he confesses early on. In the bizarro world of Paint Soup, Mitch Hedberg is the God MC, Ai Weiwei hangs with Papa Roach and udon noodles come laced with codeine—and the more you listen, the more it all starts to makes impossible sense.

SEE IT: Paint Soup plays the Liquor Store, 3341 SE Belmont St., with Spinnaface, Chilly Willy, Este and DJ Eric Fury, on Thursday, Oct. 26. 8 pm. $5. 21+.