It’s been nearly three years since Man On The Moon II: The Legend of Mr. Rager came out. Now, on the eve of summer in 2013, Scott Mescudi is back with Indicud. Where does this record rank out of the three Cudi releases? Upon only one listen through it’s right in the middle but closer to MOTHM1 than MOTMII. I really appreciate a few things about Indicud.

If you remember, back on MOTM1, Cudi leads in a track with the DreamWorks theme song and if you think about it that makes sense seeing as the DreamWorks logo is literally a man(child)  reclining on in a crescent moon.  On this 2013 release Cudi continues  his appreciation of the cinema with a clip from one of his favorite movies Billy Madison. In addition to the movie interlude I like how Indicud, flows seamlessly between tracks without pause. Harder in execution than in theory. I also dig what I have noticed on a few albums of late and hope is a new trend in hip hop music; there are a limited number of tracks that have guest appearances on them. Not too long ago every single song was featuring some artist taking up real estate besides the peson who is bringing the listener to the album in the first place. “Hey, you wanna pay to come to this party and hang out with me? Yes! Awesome, now that you’re here please hang out with these other people I know for 50% of the time that you may care less about.”

That being said, standing out on this collection of songs is the incredibly infectious “Red Eye.” You may see that it features HAIM and think ohhhhhhh sure, the music blogger picked the song with HAIM in it. Classic music blogger. Guilty as charged.  

“With “Red Eye” like all good songs, it’s not just the names listed in the “Artist” line that  count.  “Red Eye” has just as much star power with the men behind the scenes as it does with the women infront of the mic. None other than auditory crack cook, Hit Boy himself is the man pulling the strings. According to Cudi, the track had quite the maturation period as he and Hit Boy were working on it for two years or so before HAIM completely took over 2012,  got in the studio with “dope energy,”  had the song reworked to their strengths and finally molded into the track posted below.

When asked about the album Cudi said, “You’ve just got to bring the madness sometimes,” and anytime you create a hip-hop album with a track over 9:00 minutes featuring Michael Bolton, you have done just that.