Complicate Your Life with Violence answers eternal questions with an assassin’s bluntness: when do you fight and when do you flee, what does sanity look like in a sick world, how does one retain valor among the corrupt, and why does the union of one producer and one MC always yield the best music? The complex anti-heroes at the center of this blood hailstorm are Jeremiah Jae and L’Orange -- the Chicago fracture rap demigod and the sampledelic North Carolina cubist. Sequels are usually fated to be repetitive: a ceaseless treadmill of repeated jokes and concepts. So for their sophomore effort on Mello Music Group, Jae and L’Orange went full True Detective, transporting their existential outlaws into an entirely novel universe. Their debut, The Night Took Us In Like Family was a seedy shadowland that subverted the tropes of film noir. It was hailed by Pitchfork as a “seamless pairing,” while Okayplayer raved about its ability to conjure dark and treacherous vibes. The pair are backed by brilliant turns from the most enigmatic geniuses of the modern underground: Chester Watson, Billy Woods, Zeroh and Lojii. The end result is something that fits few analogies: a record that exists in the warped dust of history but feels innately relevant to the schizophrenia of modern existence. It’s Jeremiah Jae and L’Orange on a great escape, finding no concrete answers but asking all the right questions -- a masterpiece that can be interpreted in a dozen different ways, glimpsed through a gun smoke haze, hard boiled but blood simple. Check it out below...