Donnie Trumpet and the Social Experiment - Surf first listen review: Chance the Rapper goes psych

Releasing a rap album in 2015 isn’t as straightforward as it should be. From Lil Wayne’s perpetually delayed final Carter album to early releases/leaks forcing Earl Sweatshirt and Kendrick Lamar’s hands, often things are mothballed or shunted forward by forces well outside of an artist’s or label’s control. Chance the Rapper has taken a different approach entirely in releasing Surf, a sort-of follow up to 2013’s mixtape hit Acid Rap, with Donnie Trumpet and the Social Experiment (the latter being the live band he tours and records with). It’s a sort-of follow-up because he’s not simply moonlighting as Donnie Trumpet. That’s the alias of 21-year-old trumpeter Nico Segal who is joined by other members Nate Fox, Peter Wilkins and drummer Greg “Stix” Landfair Jr, while Chancelor Bennett is billed just as another part of the group. A self-effacing, limelight-sharing side man.

But that cameo role isn’t obvious on Surf. Opening track Miracle sees him take centre stage while he spits staggering, complex and meandering lyrics (that defythe GZA’s recent assertion that lyricism in modern rap is a lost art) over backing that could be provided by Steve Winwood’s psych rockers Traffic. But he’s far from the only attraction: Slip Slide alone features a cornucopia of rappers and singers including an in-form Busta Rhymes, BoB, BJ the Chicago Kid and Janelle Monaé.

Some have said this isn’t a rap album, but if that’s the case it does a pretty good job of pretending to be one with King Louie, Big Sean, J Cole and Quavo of Migos fame all showing up and well, rapping. That non-rap characterisation is probably because musically, the whole thing sits somewhere between Flying Lotus’s opus You’re Dead and Kendrick Lamar’s To Pimp a Butterfly; and as with those two albums jazz is everywhere (Windows, Just Wait, Something Came To Me), only here it is tempered by the psych elements that often take over tracks and transport them off somewhere else just as trippy as Acid Rap.

Other stand-out moments are found in collaborations such as on Rememory, where Erykah Badu emerges as a benevolent matriarch asking Chance how his day has gone, as if she’s channeling Alfre Woodard’s character in Spike Lee’s Crooklyn. Perhaps the most poignant track, however, is Wanna Be Cool, where Chance is the singing, rapping, I-can-do-it-all front man while he spells out his reluctance to be held up as just that, singing: “I don’t want to be cool, I just want to be me” over smooth, brazenly joyful Jam and Lewis 80s-style production. Live he, Donnie Trumpet and the Social Experiment have already proven potent and now on record they’ve gone into the studio and done something even more impressive by pulling together the energy of their live offering and moulding collaborators from across the rap-world spectrum into it.

Even if this is billed as a group enterprise the thing that you’re left with after listening to Surf is that regardless of how much Chance the Rapper might not want to be the main attraction he is, and absolutely should be. His lyrics are consistently the most interesting, his flow the most original and here he sounds content, as if in the group setting he is completely comfortable with being (in his mind at least) just one of the guys. Clearly though, he’s much more than that.