Edan spent the early stages of his career transmuting Class of ’88 boom-bappery into time-unstuck Möbius strip collage, with works like his 2000 Primitive Plus using sample-flip iconoclasm to treat the past, present, and future of music as compatible aesthetics instead of disparate moments on a timeline. And then, on Beauty and the Beat, he used that perspective for a big retro-tweaking concept: if cratediggers built a major sonic foundation on recordings of the past, why not lean into that and make a deliberately revisionist take on psychedelic rock using sample-based postmodernism? This is how you get an album that’s simultaneously deeply indebted to the old traditions of hip-hop culture, especially lyrically (and in a boisterous, from-the-chest delivery that feels distinctly informed by the way people rapped in 1983), while sounding like a deliberate subversion of its place in music in relation to more traditional rock forms. The weirdness feels starkest in tracks like “Fumbling Over Words That Rhyme” and his two-man mic-trade sessions with Insight (“The Science of the Two” and “Funky Voltron”), which pay both stylistic and namedropping homage to old-school hip-hop pioneers over beats that sound far closer to the soundtrack to an acid-fueled Happening than anything that ever rocked a Bronx block party. But it clicks because the sense of rhythmic drive cuts through all the freaky-deaky ornamentation, even when Edan’s emphatic voice has to pick up the slack left by beats where the drums are pared back or reduced to blurry smears (“Smile”; “Promised Land”). And when the tracks are built around the more gnarled and intense corners of psych and early metal like the Dagha-featuring band name game “Rock and Roll” or the Floydian b-boy freakout bolstering Edan’s and Percee P’s kaleidoscopic-internal-rhyme verses on “Torture Chamber,” it can damn near turn your ears inside out.