Beware Beware Beware (More Lullabies)

About a minute into Beware Beware Beware (More Lullabies), Quelle Chris’ new instrumental release, a distorted, inhuman voice emerges, repeating “Body after body after body” in a glassy-eyed timbre. Quelle deploys it again in the title track, this time taking a full minute to shift it from a muffled, druggy drone to an anxious squeak. At first, the voice sounds like a euphoria-numbed reveler bragging about their nonstop party lifestyle, the bodies like the writhing mass at the end of Society; as the pitch rises, the phrase reads more like a shock response to the fields of destruction that fill every screen. It’s unnerving. The beat roiling beneath is a trance-inducing Dr. John ritual, a circular rhythm of toms and handclaps that wrap around an ominous, ascending bassline. We’re locked in a doom loop, Quelle seems to say, living dopamine hit to dopamine hit.

Beware Beware Beware is a sequel to 2016’s similarly dark beat tape, Lullabies for the Broken Brain. Both are showcases for Quelle’s idiosyncratic production style, in which loping drum patterns and jagged samples combine into unintuitive grooves. Lullabies was an interior record, ruminating on internal spirals of loneliness; Beware is more outwardly focused. It’s a reaction to the shredding of the social contract that’s accelerated in recent years, a baggy-eyed document of what it’s like to live through collapse. Song titles like “What They Truly Fear Is What We Fear to Be” and “Be Afraid of Everything Trust No One” get the point across, and despite the warm tape saturation that blankets all 12 songs, Beware feels more like a crisis than a comfort.

The white-knuckle energy makes for a captivating listen. Taking cues from 2022’s DEATHFAME, his last solo rap record, Quelle burrows deeper into that album’s caked-on grit. Everything is hazy and backlit, as if experienced during a dissociative state. If you let your eyes glaze over, you’ll be swept away by the uncoiling Ethio-jazz of “Camouflage Cameras” and the smoky, broken beat cantor of “AI Hearts fka Walk Close to Me aka I Need Somebody.” The grooves lead all over the stylistic map: The processed vocals echoing through “Good Earth” carry shades of vaporwave; the disjointed chops and distant drums of “Again My Friend” recall the warped psychedelia of Dilla’s Donuts; “Money vs Passion” could pass for a brief interlude on one of Lonnie Liston Smith’s cosmic excursions.

In his savvy sound design, Quelle mirrors a fractured world. The drums on “We Raise Hell Behind Those We Love” sound like remote detonations, and the ticking hi-hats are placed near the fore of the mix—a time bomb that’s constantly moving closer. “Everyone’s a Winner in America” paints a hair-raising audio portrait of the United States: a barrage of sirens, atonal screeches, blasts of noise that mimic car crashes or gunshots, and a smarmy, acid-dipped voice repeating the hard R. But despite its bleak atmosphere, Beware is a hopeful (even if only slightly) protest record at heart. It instructs you not to look away, because being able to recognize the devastation allows you to imagine what comes after. Even its anti-streaming distribution method—released as a limited cassette and digital download on Cavalier’s website—asks you to think outside the current paradigm, to understand that nothing we’re living through is inevitable. Quelle is as beaten down as the rest of us, but refuses to become numb to it all. In the final seconds of the title track, a computer-generated monotone, sputtering and dying, offers a Terminator 2 thumbs up: “Thank You. Stay strong. Never give up.”