“Accelerator” [ft. Danny Brown]

Working with Paul White often brings out the gloom in Danny Brown’s life. White’s beats quieti the mind of Brown’s zany, fellatio-obsessed druggy persona, and summon the small-time Detroit cornerboy with a surplus of indigent tales. Usually when they get together, Danny’s voice goes lifeless and the outlook gets bleak with sobering, down-on-my-luck bars like “ain’t got a pot to piss in, can’t afford to pay attention” (“Fields”). They made a song about Wonder Bread as a delicacy of the destitute. They made a song called “Downward Spiral.” They have dejection down to a science.

A longtime collaborator, White produced the lion’s share of last year’s spiraling celebrity critique, Atrocity Exhibition. They’ve come together again for a collaborative EP called Accelerator, and its title track ditches somber introspection for something a little more pulse pounding. “Accelerator” is busy and restless.. White delivers drums in frantically beating clusters—the way you imagine Ewen MacIntosh’s (of the British “Office”) heart must throb as he chases after his brain in the song’s accompanying video. Distorted sound fills what little dead air is left, and Danny penetrates every opening with his manic voice.. There’s a focus on loudness here, but he never loses his sense of timing amid the ruckus. His voice, which somehow cuts through all the noise, is still his greatest asset, even as he spins wide-eyed tales about snorting oxy with a groupie in the maid’s room. Brown, by his own admission, calls this song a “Verbal Comic-Con,” and he treats his characters (haters, rappers, groupies) as accessories in his story or at odds with his vision. “I never glorify,” he roars. “I tell it how it is.”