Scott has been criticized for nabbing other rappers’ styles (often his adlibs recall Young Thug’s, often his choruses recall Kid Cudi’s - although that’s Cudi himself on “Way Back” and “Through the Late Night”), but that’s not how I hear it. A hauntingly surreal dream of excess half-remembered in tranquility, with those cascading keyboards and digital sputters playing faintly in the back of your head as a nagging reminder, the album squishes over song boundaries like overflowing bathwater songs drip into each other and seep onto the floor. So do song structures depart from convention, and for every rap/chorus/rap hook machine there’s a through-composed vocoded rant-confession over sedative beats at halftime, or a song that swerves in the middle and never returns to where it started, or a skewed fragment of a song glinting at the edges where it broke off from something larger - as when “Through the Late Night” rides a shiny, glimmering trancebeat that inspires much inarticulate, electronically filtered moaning while perpetually circling back to the same rousing chant (“Sleep today then we play/all through the late night/uh uh uh uh uh uh/all through the late night”), or when “Sdp Interlude” builds three minutes of impossible poetry from nothing but glittering synthesizer and the repeated command “Smoke some drink some pop one,” at once oddly meditative and oddly catchy. Lacking one distinctive vocal signature, Scott raps in several voices, sometimes at once, usually content with his midrange drone but frequently overdubbing higher shrieks and squeals into the background, or building a song around a chanted chorus lower than the norm. Slow, unobtrusive (although sometimes quite crunchy) drum clicks and spare, heavy basslines frame a whizzing, impressionistic blur including but not limited to minimal splashes of keyboard loop and maximal blocks of keyboard gloss, grimy or whooshy or clinically antiseptic electronic texture as the case may be, and the disembodied ghost of Auto-Tune floating through the digital soundscape in search of a larynx to burrow into. Unlike whatever style of ambient tickles your fancy, Birds in the Trap Sing McKnight crackles with sonic filth, gauzy aural detail, weird ugly noises to listen to. Practically formless, densely splattery, glowing and mesmerizing and totally immersive, the album isn’t a response to hedonism but rather aims to replicate your brain on ditto. It’s just a gross, sweaty, seductive, drug-addled environment in itself, the world Future crawls out from every now and then to write a song. Declining such tight craft, Birds in the Trap Sing McKnight doesn’t imply or depict anything. While sharp and bitter and sui generis though the album’s skittering drums and colorful electroloops were, they moved with the elegance typical of formalized, chart-friendly hip-hop, with extra cognitive dissonance courtesy of Future’s mechanized astroboy vocals jolting the music into the realm of sci-fi surrealism and hence suggesting a level of repressed pain left implicit. Last year, Future’s DS2 was widely declared the quintessential miserable drug-rap manifesto, but there substance overload was the theme, not the form. If Rodeo isn’t quite focused enough for its blurry vision to come through, too upbeat for the trip to kick in, the terrific single and radio behemoth “Antidote” sums up Scott’s ethos: no hook, really, not even a looped beat, just squishy synth atmosphere and low bass jitter floating about as Scott murmurs childishly pretty boasts about “the night show.” It was weird hearing a song this antisocial, this straight-up avant-garde, on the radio, but pretty soon his anonymous vocal garble begins to stick in the mind’s ear, and his new Birds in the Trap Sing McKnight (what a title!), out since September, plays like “Antidote” stretched to nearly an hour. Scott’s been a Houston trap-rap fixture for years, but his breakthrough came last year with his major label debut, Rodeo, and his infamous Rodeo Tour, which earned him a reputation for energetic cathartic fierceness that hardly applies to his recorded music. It’s addictive, too good luck turning off this music when the cherry/mint/codeine buzz starts tasting unhealthy, which is the whole attraction. Play it on the dancefloor and people will slow to a crawl, frozen in place by the surge of dopamine suddenly oozing into the bloodstream. Any name rapper can hire a cadre of otiose guest producers and/or vocalists to weigh down their project few can sound this weighed down, stunned, out of it, in the grain of the voice as well as the beats, what with all the hypnotic synth trickle and insinuatingly eerie keyboards and drippy, druggy hazy daze. Those searching for the true sound of unadulterated decadence should check out the new Travis Scott album.