or better or worse, we here at Stylus, in all of our autocratic consumer-crit greed, are slaves to timeliness. A record over six months old is often discarded, deemed too old for publication, a relic in the internet age. That's why each week at Stylus, one writer takes a look at an album with the benefit of time. Whether it has been unjustly ignored, unfairly lauded, or misunderstood in some fundamental way, we aim with On Second Thought to provide a fresh look at albums that need it.

El-P ranks fairly high among musicians I wouldn’t want to get on the bad side of (remember his beef with Sole a few years back, which inspired “Linda Tripp,” maybe the most sneakily venomous diss track of all time?), but it looks like his former label, Rawkus Records, has just done so. Rumor has it that they’re ailing financially, so my guess is that they’ve reissued this record—which I thought was released on Rawkus via another label, but who can understand the vagaries of this sort of thing?—to cash in on the current de rigeur status of Def Jux among hip-hop and indie fans. At least the label had the balls not to censor the not-so-subliminal diss appearing under the transparent CD tray, a hand-amended version of the Co Flow “Independent as Fuck” logo which now reads “Independent as Fox” (a swipe at Rawkus’ owner, son of Rupert Murdoch), right?

Though I don’t necessarily feel great about lining the coffers of a label likely to put out Soundboming V (which, from the looks of things, is sure to feature the return of Arrested Development and Ma$e, with a hip-house retread by Ja Rule and Ashanti sandwiched between audio of old Lyricist Lounge Show sketches), I couldn’t pass up a chance to hear this album, which I’d daydreamed about hearing since reading its name on Alec Empire’s best-of list, circa 1999. Once terribly difficult to find, this is an entirely instrumental record constructed by El Producto and Mr. Len of the group. For those unfamiliar with El-P’s production style, let it suffice to say that it’s gloomy and psychedelic. At the same time, there’s an undeniably wicked sense of humor afoot, even when the guy’s not spouting rhymes about wood nymphs in crotchless lederhosen or gigapet rapists: just listen to “Suzy Pulled a Pistol on Henry,” a child-abuse revenge-fantasy that references a song from Funcrusher Plus. Featuring snatches of a don’t-let-strangers-touch-you-there informational record for the youth of America, circa 1981, is pretty creepily brilliant in itself, but El-P’s backing the poorly-acted molester’s voice with some muted lounge-funk as a preamble to the song proper, then throwing in a staggering beat, some garbled snatches of cartoon music, and more than a few gunshots seals things as far as making this a disturbing montage.

Sonically, things aren’t quite on the level of glossy invention El-P perfected by the time Cannibal Ox’s debut LP dropped, but they’re thankfully up a few notches from the murky, dub-of-a-dub stylings of some of Co Flow’s earlier singles. “Linoleum” is a hard-hitting, spacious upgrade of the standard Co Flow style, featuring live fuzz-bass, a cold, punishing beatbox, and the addition of more than a few random sound effects, including some digital gargles and synth swoops that evoke the probable yester-morrow nightmares of the b-boys of old. “Friend Vs. Friend” and “Bee Aware” are more traditional takes on crackly-loop funk, gritty, cop-show horns and all, but more often than not there’s an unpredictable element tossed in from left field that gives things a diagonal slant, the sense that you’re hearing instrumental hip-hop as filtered through at least one chemically-altered form of refraction: the creepy, rinky-dink organ that enters the latter midway through is a perfect example of the subtle grotesquerie that creeps in here. The slo-mo crawl of “# Nine” perfects this formula, with plenty of degraded bleeps, sloppy percussion, and a druggy 22 kHz loop from a guitar solo: think Need New Body remixed by DJ Screw.

Of course, even as the fucked-up-samples formula is known to hit its payoffs, this is not an album without its missteps: “BMS Digital” strays a bit too far into dissonance (pitched-down Tron voices, atonal keyboard chatter, a beat that never connects), while “Worker Ant Uprise” tries for cinematic slow-burn suspense and never succeeds (it contains a bit too many arpeggios conjured from some dusty Roland for my liking). Thankfully, the highly RZA-derivative—I mean this as a compliment—“World of Garbage” comes in during the album’s last third to salvage one’s interest, and a few truly twisted tracks afterward finish the job nicely.

Remarkably, despite Little Johnny’s instrumental status, I never feel as if it’s missing anything. Maybe it’s due to the fact that the skillful, detailed production conveys all the grit and drama that any lyrical narrative could, or that El-P et al. always rapped (and continue to) a bit too fast and cram-it-all-in for my liking. Regardless, this is a fine record, and an absolute must for fans of oddball, rule-breaking hip-hop production.