- Quelle Chris is Detroit's best kept secret. An underground mainstay for the better half of two decades, Chris has painstakingly built a reputation off album after album of unique concepts, charming lyricism, and colourful production to match. His latest, simply titled Guns, follows up 2017's one-of-a-kind Being You Is Great: a top to bottom deconstruction of Quelle's psyche packing all the emotional depth of an existential crisis into its diverse track listing. In 2019, Quelle is by no means the only underground rapper on a creative streak, but every consistent and polished record he puts out makes him increasingly impossible to ignore.
This sentiment couldn't be truer with Guns, an album arriving at a time where mass-shootings seem like a regular occurrence. The cover feature's Quelle's face awash in a sea of bullets with various firearms protruding from every orifice. This level of satiric confidence is prevalent throughout his work but never feels like it's dumbing things down.
On Guns, Chris is as lyrically intelligent as ever, dissecting the topic from such a range of perspectives that describing it as 'multi-faceted' seems insufficient. Opener Spray and Pray sees him playing a violence-hungry veteran, a bragadocious pusher on Mind Ya Business, and even a sentient gun on the title track. If anything, these thematic left-hooks show that Quelle's overall message is far from single sided.
Guns' production accommodates this forward-thinking diversity with a set of self-produced beats that animate Quelle's twisted world. His typically quirky bricolage of styles is reigned in to allow for some melodic choruses. Now I'll admit, as a fan of the underground's grittier side, some of these rubbed me the wrong way. Posse cut Straight Shot feels restricted by its numerous contributors while You, Me & Nobody Else, the record's only real stylistic misstep, adopts the exact aesthetic of a Noname song and is worse off for it.
Still, not once do these lacklustre production efforts detract from the core idea of each song. Quelle is a soft-spoken lyrical giant whose talents only continue to amaze. Wild Minks with Mach Hommy buries auto-biographical reflection beneath an avalanche of Biblical references in a ludicrously impressive display of metaphor and flow. Meanwhile, closing track Will You Remember Me strips back layers of cryptic irony to deliver a refreshingly raw and emotional final message.
It's all part of an impressive balancing act. If you'll pardon the pun, Chris isn't gun-shy to pessimistic social critique, but offsets these heavy concepts with humorous satire and moments of revealing honesty. The lead singles had me worried for some sort of compromise but Guns has nothing of the sort. Quelle proves once again he's able to tackle high-minded ideas through equal lenses of fiction and reality. The resulting record might be his most fully realised yet. I can nitpick minor gripes forever but, at the end of the day, few rappers have as much personality, drive, and vision as Quelle Chris. That's something you shouldn't overlook.
- Boddhi Farmer.