Yahoo! Music Album Review

Released on 21/8/06
Label: SonyBMG

"Too much inspiration," mutters Big Boi distractedly at one point and it's hard to disagree. The Atlantan hip hop duo's sixth LP proper is - rather like the two-headed "The Love Below / Speakerboxx" before it - a sprawling (78 minutes long), creatively undisciplined epic overloaded with (often brilliant) ideas that both thrills and frustrates in equal measure.

It's essentially an extended soundtrack for a film of the same name, which is set in the fictional town of Idlewild in Georgia in the '30s / '40s and features André 3000 and Big Boi playing a mortician's son cum aspiring musician and bootlegging numbers runner respectively. Since the movie isn't released in the UK until October, some of the album tracks make little conceptual sense. That, however, is not the main problem with "Idlewild".

It's impressive, certainly, but spectacles are most striking when given human scale, so that their awesome power may humble, rather than overwhelm. In that regard, "Idlewild" is a musical Niagara Falls and, around the halfway mark, listeners are in danger of being swamped. Still, the formal schizophrenia of OutKast's last double album has gone and the two have even managed to restrain their rampantly divergent musical preferences (Big Boi's for beats and rhymes, Dré's for funk and Cotton Club swing, jazz and blues) to co-write four of the 25 tracks, superlative second single, "Morris Brown" included.

The movie's period setting may have determined its musical style, but "Idlewild" still manages a damn good wriggle around inside its genre straitjacket. Thus, Big Boi's "Peaches" sets guests Sleepy Brown's and Scar's rolling rhymes against smooth, Prince-ly funk; his "N2U" riffs on Minnie Ripperton's "Lovin' You" inside a Daisy Age framework; Dré's "Life Is Like A Musical" sources Stevie Wonder, his "Chronomentrophobia" is a metronomic bit of beats freakery with a message; and album closer, "A Bad Note" a plain weird, funereal psych dirge.

Playing more to retro type are the choppy, blues harp-strafed "Idlewild Blue", "Call The Law" (a blend of boogie woogie and black spiritual) and "Morris Brown", which marries a stuttering drum pattern with steel pan action and '40s supper-club jazz / swing. In between, a peppering of the sort of skits without which no hip hop album (however tangential) would be complete.

The album cover is 3-D - look at the image one way and there's Big Boi at the mic, with Dré at his keys in the background; tilt the image and then Dré looms large, hunched over his piano with Big Boi behind him. Separatism might seem an odd working method for a duo, but it clearly suits this one well. Imperfect and absurdly oversized it may be, but only OutKast could have pulled off a crazy creative coup like "Idlewild". That surely counts for something.

    by Sharon O'Connell