Steven Ellison, aka Flying Lotus, is an obsessive, opinionated hip-hop fan who's never quite sure how his own music fits in. As he explained to Pitchfork last year, "I feel like I'm hip-hop's fucking weird step-child and they don't want to see me." When talking about Lil Wayne in an earlier interview, he asked for some impromptu A&R help: "I just want to get on a mixtape… You know him? Hook it up, man!" Later, Big Sean's state-of-the-art, big-money solo record inspired him to tweet, "Oh rap.. You used to be such a beautiful bitch, now look at you.. Look at you!" Poor guy couldn't even get it together with a relatively accessible dude like Tyler, the Creator and he lives in the same city: "I don't know what it is, but they ain't fucking kicking my door down." His candor has been refreshing and also frustrating: This isn't some chump using Soundcloud comments to drop links to his beat tapes. What's stopping him from actually making a Flying Lotus hip-hop record?

In a sense, we still don't know. The previously anonymous rap entity Captain Murphy has since been revealed as Steven Ellison, but the project doesn't extend the aesthetic of Flying Lotus albums into the rap realm. Instead, it's lowbrow, heavy-lidded, and charmingly giddy about its love for all things Wu-Tang, Odd Future, and Stones Throw. If you can get past the fact that it doesn't change the game or even try to, you can see it for what it is: one of the best hip-hop albums to come out of any of those camps in 2012.

While Captain Murphy will be seen as a side project, it still feels like the product of a FlyLo-level work ethic. But the process is inverted: Los Angeles, Cosmogramma and Until the Quiet Comes each constitute 45 or so minutes of impossibly dense music delivered as a single piece meant to be consumed in one sitting. Duality is far more even-keeled and is presented as a sum of easily segmented, constituent parts. The deluxe mixtape changes artwork with every track, enhancing its interactive, Viewfinder-like feel.

Ellison handles the majority of the production, along with Brainfeeder associates like Teebs and Samiyam, who forego the astral jazz and to dig in the same crates where Madlib and Dilla got their fingers dusty. If a sample sounded a little too vigorous for beanbag chair repose, it didn't make the cut. Everything's subsumed under such a thick cloud of weed smoke that even higher profile guests like Just Blaze and Earl Sweatshirt simply take their rightful place in the puff-puff-pass procedure.

Much of Duality's initial intrigue lies in Ellison's rapping; you can't help wondering what he sounds like and what he's going to rap about now that he's finally decided to take the mic. It's filled with morally casual lines like "It's getting real late now, delivery DiGiorno/ Either fuck a fat bitch or I'mma settle for this porno" and couplets that conflate blowjob jokes with "Dragonball Z" references like a latter day Bobby Digital.

This aspect gave credence to the persistent rumor that Captain Murphy was actually Tyler, the Creator going incognito in his laziest publicity stunt yet (yes, even more so than Young Nigga). And yes, the most common vocal filter Ellison employs makes him sound almost exactly like Tyler. It's particularly apparent when Ellison stammers through multi-syllable thickets of softcore shock tactics such as "Bitches love it when I'm fuckin' rough and stuff/ Hate to see me drunk walkin' like I'm Snuffleufagus," and "Captain known to choke a blonde/ Does she like it?/ No doubt even though she cryin'/ Oh wow, simmer down I only kinda mean it."

But with hindsight, you can certainly see Ellison leaving a breadcrumb trail to his true identity. On "Children of the Atom", he snarls "Two Grammys on my wishlist/ I blame it on my fans," a likely nod at his rant against being shut out for Cosmogramma. One of his introductory tracks, "Between Friends", ends with a slightly-skewed Brainfeeder shout-out, and on "The Killing Joke", he boasts "Labels tryin' to sign me/ Speculating my identity/ Good luck, you'll never find me." This is one of the most respected beatmakers and label heads out there, but recasting himself as an anonymous but suspiciously cosigned rapper probably got more people interested than "Flying Lotus raps now."

While the relentlessly active pitch-shifting and stereo panning is meant to render Ellison as some kind of hallucinogenic voice projection, Duality proves that he's the best rapper on his own label. Check the motormouthed, Busta Rhymes-style onomatopoeia on "Mighty Morphin Foreskin" or "Drive Thru", which seems modeled after Das Racist's loopy "People Are Strange". His voice is constantly in motion and the lyrics are subtly rife with clever wordplay, incidental sound effects, and bawdy jokes. In fact, it's only when conventionally personified Brainfeeder rappers like Jeremiah Jae and Azizi Gibson show up that Duality feels pedestrian.

That is, unless you think a very good weed-rap tape is pedestrian by default. Ellison's work as Flying Lotus tends to inspire lofty comparisons-- Aphex Twin, Dilla and of course, his own Coltrane lineage. So anything under that name that doesn't feel like a statement will register as a lesser work. But what about the Flying Lotus who performs live with a bottle of Jameson and a laptop full of TNGHT, Waka Flocka Flame, and Schoolboy Q bangers? This isn't FlyLo's long-threatened Dirty South beat tape and it's probably not something that will make Kanye West reach out to him. But make no mistake, this record is fun in a way that Flying Lotus records choose not to be and satisfying in a way that most of his peers' fail to be.