With all apologies to Snoop, DJ Quik is having the most entertaining career evolution of any ’90s G-Funk holdover. (Not that too many of these guys are having third acts). While the general perception out there might be that he’s “washed up,” Compton’s finest ghostwriter-less MC/producer has been making great music throughout the current decade, from his oddball freelance production work (“Addictive,” that genius ‘02 track wasted on one of the world’s worst singers, Truth Hurts, yet saved by the brilliant Rakim cameo; The Black Album’s “Justify My Thug”) to his intensely personal, criminally overlooked ‘05 LP, Trauma.

Short of a project with Snoop himself (the two have allegedly formed a production unit, QDT, with Teddy Riley), Kurupt is perhaps the ideal sidekick for Quik, who seems to have a thing for duos these days (see 2007’s aborted Fixxers project with AMG). “Young Gotti” (time to lose that nickname, dude) is a very good rapper who hasn’t given us much reason to check for him post-Death Row. Over Quik’s leftfield beats, though, he sounds reinvigorated.

The most remarkable thing about BlacQKout is its looseness. Musically, it is all over the place; there’s little acknowledgment of gangster rap or whatever you think these guys are supposed to be doing. (In this respect the album is almost comparable to J Dilla’s Welcome 2 Detroit). On the reggae-flavored “Exodus,” Kurupt plays the role of dancehall chatter, spending the entire track exhorting: “Jump, stomp, pump and reach again.” it’s hard to imagine any other producer, short of Dre in the early ’90s, getting him near this zone. The creative centerpiece of the record, “Jupiter’s Critic and the Mind of Mars,” is a 2-minute, club-paced dive bomb of a track with just Quik rapping through a ring modulator (don’t confuse that with Autotune, like this guy)

Lyrically, things are equally loose. Take “Hey Playa! (Morroccan Blues),” originally slated to be BlacQKout’s lead single before “9 Times Outta 10″ took its place. On it, Quik returns to existential crisis mode a la Trauma; Kurupt just talks up girls. The lack of synergy between their verses is almost the point; both work well, so who cares if they’re taking completely different tacks?

Quik’s awareness of, and ability to laugh off, his shortcomings is one of his most endearing traits. On Trauma, he reveled in a sort of Cali equivalent to Sean Price’s self-deprecating NY rhymes, laughing off his personal and financial problems. Just seconds into this album, on the titular “BlaQKout,” he goes right back there, crafting a metaphor in which he compares LA’s view of his not-always-successful career to the status of a hood kid who flunked off his college scholarship, but at least got that far: “And even though I don’t win no Grammys/I still get love in the streets, from the papis and mamis/ I’ll be damned they ain’t family/They treat me like I flunked out of Grambling/But they happy that I went on a scholarship, goddamn me.” Brilliant.

Like last week’s “Record of the Week” artists, Hypnotic Brass Ensemble, I published an abbreviated version of an interview with Quik but can not locate the original transcript. It’s frustrating not to be able to share those outtakes here because my interview with Quik, conducted for URB just before the release of Trauma, was memorable and refreshing. Quik was incredibly open with me and, while detailing some of the tragedies that had befallen him in recent years (namely the murder of his best friend by his nephew at his Woodland Hills, CA home), he actually got choked up. It’s not easy to get people to open up on phone interviews, particularly rappers. I appreciated that he went there with me.

I’m going to be making this “Record of the Week” thing a regular feature. It won’t necessarily be a record that’s “slept on,” though in most cases it will be that. I mean, while it needs all the help it can get to rack up the sales and radio play it deserves, critics certainly have not slept on BlaQKout. Noz has been talking it up for a while now; the Times, Complex and Vibe all gave it solidly positive reviews. But there’s always at least one new record I’m feeling that I won’t get to talk about anywhere else, and that I feel could use some contextualizing. This will be a space to do that.

Here’s the video for “9 Times Outta 10:”

Budget Youtube video for “Do You Know”: