Michael Christmas, Chris Crack, Girl Talk - Don't Come To My House Sharing Your Location

Gregg Gillis spent the back half of the 2000s making mashup records that sounded like the entire history of pop music falling down a flight of stairs. For the last decade he has quietly been working as a rap producer instead, and this is the most fun he has sounded doing it. He brought Boston's Michael Christmas and Chicago's Chris Crack to his hometown of Pittsburgh and put all three of them in a room together, which turns out to be the whole point.

Six tracks, and the titles alone are worth the money: "Wouldn't Go To Chili's With Michael B. Jordan," "Garfield Hated Mondays But Didn't Have A Job," "Dr. Umar Radio Station On GTA6," "Vending Machine Charcuterie Board." Christmas and Crack are two of the funniest rappers working, and Gillis builds them beats with real hooks and structure while keeping his sample-collage instincts fully intact. It plays like a big-budget rap record rewired by someone with much stranger taste. Recorded at ID Labs by Big Jerm, mastered by Chris Gehringer.

The chemistry is the selling point. Braggadocio keeps tipping over into self-awareness, the jokes keep landing somewhere earnest, and nobody is trying to out-serious anybody else. Additional sessions happened in Boston and Chicago, but the whole thing sounds like three people in the same room genuinely enjoying each other, which is rarer on collaborative rap projects than it ought to be.

Limited to 500 copies on violet transparent vinyl in a gatefold jacket, with vinyl-only instrumentals of all six tracks filling side B. Illegal Art and C&G Records, IA 2602.