Getting Mashed In The Neutral Bling Hotel

I usually don’t bother with mashup albums unless I’m especially fond of and familiar with the base material, but for anyone else who has every note of Neutral Milk Hotel’s In The Aeroplane Over The Sea album indelibly etched in their mind AND a reasonable knowledge of popular hip-hop, Psycosis’s In My G4 Over Da Sea is well worth a listen.

The album doesn’t always succeed at finding the right balance between fairly maximalist hip-hop originals and the NMH sound (there is, for example, just too much going on in the opening mashup between “Ante Up” and “King Of Carrot Flowers pt 1”) but “King Of Jesus Walks, Pts 2 and 3” and “Look At The Two-Headed Boy” are much better blends.

When working with less complex hip-hop originals, the mashups work pretty well. I actually prefer “Communist Mic” over Nas’s original version of “One Mic” and was pleased to find that it was still possible to dougie (slowly) to “Oh Dougie”.