Hip-hop Buddy Comedy

An uneven album as astounding as it is annoying.

- CRAIG JENKINS

JAMES BLAKE and Lil Yachty are a match made in buddy-comedy heaven. The British singer-songwriter and producer has become the go-to white male vocalist selling silken hooks to the likes of Jay-Z, Ye, and Travis Scott, an unlikely outcome for the auteur, whose 2011 selftitled debut featured baroque pop and minimal dance music. Lil Yachty has a chip on his shoulder as the latest 20-something rapper dealing with unearned, unrealistic complaints about lowbrow trap music. But the purists' outrage hasn't stemmed his tide of breezy hits, guest features, and writing and production jobs with Migos and Drake. Bad Cameo, an album-length collab between Blake and Yachty, sees the duo matching wits over heady reverb-drenched hip-hop and electronic-music hybrids that nudge each artist into a more intriguing creative space.

Working with Blake pushes Lil Yachty further away from the southern and midwestern rap trends set or else savvily curated on his Lil Boat and Michigan Boy Boat mixtapes, building on the genre-spelunking of his divisive psych-rock and funk pivot, Let's Start Here. It also turns the page on a dicey stretch of news for his collaborator: Blake struggled in March to explain how Vault, a subscription service he promoted as a "nice solution" to streaming platforms' meager payouts, differs from preexisting utilities, then caught smoke in June for admitting to hating the saxophone enough to wish to delete the instrument from music history.

Bad Cameo casts him in the role of ambient- and dance-music adviser and partners him with an American foil whose commitment to whimsy can make the Brit's demure sensibilities feel refreshing.