Today's Sounds: D-Sisive (aka Derek Christoff)

Record:

D-Sisive (aka Derek Christoff), Asian Elvis: The Mixtape (independent)

Rare is a rapper as hungry and active as Toronto’s D-Sisive, who so often pays for his entrance, steps to the buffet table, then kinda grins and says, “Nah—but thank yuh very much.”

Christoff’s latest release essentially plays as a rock opera in the key of the unpolished, true-school rough rap “mixtape.” Avid listeners will recognize the rapper’s characteristic sardonica here, in a perspective focused more on effect than cause.

Recommending this tape to brand-new listeners is a gamble, but hell, what isn’t when you’re livin’ “Viva Las Vegas”-style on a TO rap income? It’s all piss, vinegar, shit ’n’ giggle dressing on top of D-Sisive’s 12-inch lunch sub.

Sure, he can break Drake right down to a designer label tank top and a major label think-tank, and do it with genuine, charming-bastard cleverness. Repeat customers might hear this as another entry in a king’s war journal, a third freebie in as many years and a whistle-whetting precursor to installment three of his maniacally engaging Jonestown series, coming Nov. 18.

D-Sisive continues at every turn to demonstrate a tempered management of his artistic hunger. His 2008 EP debut The Book and the subsequent full-length Let the Children Die set a sombre, soulful stage that he would deconstruct in short order with the indie rock-driven Vaudeville and January’s brilliant (if Brillo-edged) Run With the Creeps.

Asian Elvis, despite characteristic hard-hitting introspection, may be Christoff’s easiest-listening project to date. It’s free to take or leave (as D has more or less always presented himself), but takers will be rewarded with candor, comedy and another step toward the rapper’s inevitable ranking as “classic.”