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.

Some of our best musical art has been created by artists in crisis, be they of personality (Neil Young’s errant stylistic detours, governed by a strange internal logic we often doubt even he understands) or emotion (Sly Stone’s dark, and drug-fueled, pessimism of There’s A Riot Goin’ On) or perhaps a little of both (Fugazi’s self-deconstructing, abstruse, we’re-still-here-you-bastards-but-now-what-and-couldn’t-we-just-take-a-nap masterwork, End Hits). Of course, such work is often idiosyncratic to the point of alienating an artist’s or band’s non-hardcore-fan contingent, or even their fans—I turn now to the example of David Bowie—who often may not care much about the crisis, or crises, in question. But when bizarre quirks accumulate to the point of suggesting not mere eccentricity but madness, where there can of course be genius, compelling art is available to those willing to give it a chance. And such is the case of Del the Funky Homosapien’s No Need for Alarm, a muddled, misanthropic and often disturbing wreck of an album that will remain one of my favorite hip-hop LPs.

No Need for Alarm catches Del in transition. Past the sunny, egghead-ish funk of his (Ice-Cube-assisted) debut, I Wish My Brother George Was Here, and now teetering precariously on the verge of being dropped by his label along with his compatriots Souls of Mischief, he has yet to seek solace in geeky affectation—rhymes and whole songs about video games and, yes, anime; the superb but hopelessly opaque playing-with-Tie-fighters-in-the-bedroom fantasies of Deltron 3030—and addled, West Coast indie elder-statesman status. Right now he’s just angry, and has (don’t quote me on this one, since I’m sure a bit of release-date homework could very well prove this theory wrong) been obsessively listening to Enter the Wu-Tang: 36 Chambers, some Bad Brains, and the first Gravediggaz album on repeat while drowning his sorrows in sake. He rarely leaves his apartment, and then only to buy comic books: note the bloody death-of-Superman T-shirt our scrawny hero proudly sports on the album’s back cover, and of course the front artwork, where Del looks inappropriately crestfallen, like a fidgety kid on vacation with his parents who’s just tired of having his picture taken. (Maybe he also makes trips to Chinatown for esoteric porn.) He is a case-study in nerdy psychopathia.

An obvious analogue to this album is De La Soul is Dead, but it (like, say, the Monkees’ Head) seemed bent on confusing and alienating daisy-age fans, whereas Del seems fairly confident nobody’s listening to him in the first place. Of course, he takes potshots at the media, too (“Check it Ooout”), but his bilious diatribe at a female Rolling Stone scribe goes on far too long to be reasonable; one gets the sense that he could be directing this anger at anyone (but I’d be lying if the misogyny on display here didn’t make me feel more than a bit uneasy), that he’s got enough of it for everyone. “You’re In Shambles” makes a well-stated case at his lyrical superiority, but its immensely dark grand-piano-and-eerie-sax vibe, like something remixed by RZA off some lost evil counterpart to Midnight Marauders, communicates an angry sort of hopelessness at the rap milieu circa the time of the album’s release. He knows he’s a great MC, and so do we, but who else is out there? “Catch a Bad One” (fantastic cello sample) communicates the same kind of grim confidence, but I can’t help but think that the album was recorded in sequence and that he grew progressively more bitter as he went along: “Wack MC’s,” the first of several often gory screeds leveled at Del’s microphone competitors and the R&B balladeers who’ve grabbed the youth market, is really quite unnerving, its flaky lyrical exasperation and repetitive, tense music combining in the form of a massive is-he-joking-or-isn’t-he sneer.

The only mildly pissed, fast-moving “No Need For Alarm” delivers some relief, but—despite some of the record’s deepest, most breathless funk-jazz production—it’s not particularly accessible. “Boo Boo Heads” is conceivably the most satisfying and straightforward song on the album to its target audience of sexually frustrated, angry dorks, but I find its relentless yet essentially inept misogyny (I have the feeling that we’re listening to a bunch of disses at imaginary women, or at the very least a lot of things Del and his accomplice would never have the guts to say anywhere else other than on record [the jizz-on-your-face bit, the “I want you dead and bleeding”]), a horrible misstep. Thankfully, “Treats for the Kiddies” directs the cartoonish chop-your-motherfuckin’-head-off-then-shit-down-your-neck-cavity violence to more deserving targets, the perennial—and also quite possibly imaginary—wack MC. Plus it’s got a fierce, neck-snapping beat that does the grimy, minimalist thing properly; the epic “Wrongplace,” a grainy, realist-take-on-G-Funk (both musically and lyrically), succeeds at this almost as well.

Thankfully, the album contains a good deal of innovative, wry humor in addition to the angry spew. The uptempo, turntable-and-piano-laced “Worldwide”—on which Del duets with Unicron, a more youthful, pitch-shifted version of himself—is a highlight, as is “No More Worries,” on which some of the latter-day incarnation of the Hieroglyphics join Del in a wonderful posse cut and outsider’s anthem (high school adversaries of all sorts, and all those afflicted with wackness are targeted) that affirms the need for iconoclastic talent in a world of sorry chart-toppers. Receiving the strange, erratic joy that this song manages to supply, even in the face of all the adversity mentioned elsewhere on this record, makes it all the sadder that Elektra soon cut Del et al. loose. So maybe this is the sound of some brave men fighting a losing battle; fast-forward to the present day, and the state of things (be they commercial music’s relative level of quality or the state of our own personal lives) may be no better. But let’s drop the Panglossian silly shit and just tend our gardens, okay? Like John Lydon once said, “Our cause may be lost, but that’s not so bad.”