If you’re looking for a record you can turn on just to tune out, Soul Plug Anonymous’ PanLuna isn’t for you. While this album might be good for a sunny drive down the PCH on your fourth or fifth listen, you have to be initiated into it first. Rappers Jesse the Imaginer and LOE-i and producer Steven Gosvener won’t just hand you the keys to PanLuna. No, this beautiful, haunting, and unconventional record is something you have to earn.

Let’s get this out of the way: this is a psych record before it’s anything else. While the 808s, trap hi hats, and straightforward bars let you know that hip hop is PanLuna’s genome, the spacious trippiness of the tracks is its soul. All three members of SPA spend a lot of the record playing with closeness and distance. One set of vocals might sit way in the back with shimmering reverb just to be overtaken by dry, compressed, in-your-face rhymes that shock you back to reality one bar later. Gosvener lets 80s synth sounds chirp in your ear while droning pads moan far away. LOE-i bounces between conventional vocal processing and verbed-out autotune a la Travis Scott. A number of songs feature Jesse’s voice obscured by a drippy, hallucinogenic flanger roughed up by just enough distortion to make you wonder if this is a good or a bad trip. It’s a little of both, and that’s the point.

Don’t get me wrong. This is a very listenable, enjoyable album. Gosvener’s instrumentals stay fresh from track to track while incorporating a strongly recognizable throughline. PanLuna has a signature sound, and that sound winds its way around Jesse and LOE-i’s messages, no matter how much they evolve and change throughout the record. From the blissed-out love/war march of “Million Moons” to the drunken ominous feeling of “Neil’s Trip” to the understated and prefiguring pads of “Prologue”, Gosvener captures a lunar soundscape that, unlike the moon itself, is filled with birds and water and life. One important thing to know about this record is that it’s roomy. SPA is not afraid to let you trip on Gosvener’s audio drugs for a full minute. More than one track on this record opens with rhymes, takes a chilly, nighttime stroll through an instrumental section, then sobers you right up with more bars.

What do you get when you mix Travis Scott, Kendrick Lamar, Modest Mouse, B-Real, and those early-2000s Anticon artists? You get a glimpse into the vocal range of Jesse the Imaginer and LOE-i on this record. Jesse’s vocals on tracks like “Celestial Bodies” and “PanLuna” jump unexpectedly from manic to subdued, keeping you perpetually on your toes. LOE-i’s bars are tight, rhythmic, and straight-up clever, so it’s a real shock when he occasionally trades them for doomy, highly-processed chanting. While the range keeps things interesting, it also highlights the message and vibe of Jesse and LOE-i’s lyrics. They are not afraid to approach literature, social justice, spirituality, and love, and they do it deftly.

There are some real, raw lyrical highlights too. On my first listen of the track “Seventh Seal”, I said of LOE-i’s vocal performance, “Damn. This flow switches like crazy.” Not two seconds later, LOE-i assured me that he knew what he was doing when he says, “Racking my brain just to spew the vernacular, so my flow bounce like a catapult.” LOE-i is certainly the more staid of the two rappers. With the exception of his excursions to the overdriven, reverbed-out dark side, he plays the straightman on this record. He often bares down on the ends of phrases with tight, surgical triplets and syncopated cadence change-ups. There is probably no better example of this than his verse on “PromeZues”. It can be jarring and unpleasant when a rapper switches his flow up every two bars, but LOE-i does that here, and LOE-i does it very well. It, like so many other verses on this record, comes through tight and clean with the kind of ease you hear from a rapper who knows what he wants to say and how he wants to say it.

Where LOE-i brings a lot of the straight ahead hip hop flavor, Jesse channels the stranger, delightfully erratic spirits. On the titular track, he opens with an Isaac Brock-laced hook then careens into the over-enunciated precision of Kendrick. He doesn’t miss an opportunity to expose himself as a wordsmith either. I had to keep repeating the same two seconds of the record to finally catch up to what he was doing with this line: “Lace the tongue with so much soul so you know the shoe fits.” The most perfectly destabilizing moments of Jesse’s vocals happen in some of the album’s final tracks. After the drugged-out, underwater coda of “PanLuna”, Jesse delivers his vocals tempo rubato on “Million Moons”. As the record catches up with Major Tom and William Shatner’s Rocketman in the psyched out regions of space far above the moon, he then abandons rap conventions altogether with what is essentially a slam poetry performance on “Epilogue”.

The first note that I wrote about this album is that it is on the border of chaos without ever crossing it. It’s interesting that an album about the moon can be so mercurial. It regularly breaks the rules of song structure but never in a way that’s alienating. But it does ask a lot of the listener, primarily that they must work to understand the meaning and to find themselves at peace with the shifting and volatile nature of this music.
-Grant Burgess of WIDOWMAKER beats and Mid School Beat Making Laboratory