"I was brought up with James until I met George," Dudley Perkins muses in his trademark wounded-dog, crooning funk-speak on Funky Dudley , the opening track of,

, his second full-length release on Stones Throw Records. The lyric, in a nutshell, is a description of what makes his latest effort different from his last LP, . If his debut album was the rapper-cum-singer's attempt to mine the soulful sounds from his childhood, Expressions finds Perkins a little farther off the ground, investigating the clouds for the funk he's clearly grown enchanted with as an adult. On A Lil' Light, rapper Declaime -- familiar to West Coast hip-hop heads from his guest spots with tha Alkaholiks and two solo albums produced by Madlib -- surprised more than a few people when he traded his rapper persona for a more melodious one and sported his given name, Dudley Perkins. New listeners and old fans, however, soon embraced his new 'singing' voice: dreamily off-kilter and endearingly out-of-tune (like Snoop Dogg's if you opened up his nasal passages a bit) and held aloft by a basement full of Madlib's trademark dusty samples and hazy beats. Perkins and Madlib team up again on Expressions and manage to push things in a new direction, while maintaining the styles that make each of them unique.

Perkins seems to have found his range; he's still all over the place in terms of pitch and tone, but he bounces and floats between melody and speech, falsetto musings and baritone adlibs in a rhythm that almost makes sense but mainly just feels nice. For tracks like Get On Up and Dolla Bill he goes into full funk mode, affecting a delivery that's equal parts Parliament choir, O.D.B. and J.T. Taylor from Kool and the Gang. On other tracks like the stellar Inside , he rides the beat while loping just below the melody in a way that manages the most conventional groove on an album that's anything but conventional. Sonically, Madlib's production shines as always. He has proven over and over again that he deserves mention among the most talented and prolific producers around. Madlib's trademark is crafting tracks that sound both organically fused and authentically aged, with just a hint of weed-flavored freakiness. Madlib's best quality is his seamless mixing; listening to his songs, you don't know where the sample ends and where the instrumentation begins. His production has an unmistakable air of familiarity but always feels somewhat futuristic, as though his samples were culled from '60s soul and jazz standards that haven't been written yet. On Expressions, he amps up the futuristic, leveling off at perfect balance of sleepy soul and spacey funk. The best examples of this balance are the bouncy Separate Ways and Inside , and the dreamy 8 min. closer Dear God . The closing of "Inside" veers into a steely Funkedelic-like interlude as it bleeds into The Last Stand , a freaky science-fiction quickie and lo-fi rendition of Outkast's Aquemini-era production.

But, Testin' Me is the track on which both Perkins and Madlib hit their stylistic hallmarks at their highest points. The looped piano is vintage Madlib; a stripped down, dreamy beat with the subtlest of horn splashes, synth screeches and crowd whistles in the background. Perkins drips and drizzles his typically spiritual lyrics in a smoky tenor, providing his own background vocals with a croaky falsetto. It represents the bare essentials of what makes this partnership so perfect. (It's worth noting that, according to those in the know, out of all the artists on Stones Throw's ever-growing roster, D.P. has the first pick of Madlib's choicest beats.) For Perkins's part, dude is definitely on to something. Hailing from Oxnard, CA in the southern part of the great state, he's not too far from the Los Angeles scene that, over the last few years, has been showing serious signs of possible soul renaissance, one that's blown new funkier, less self-serious life into the comatose genre Neo-Soul. Perkins probably wouldn't consider himself a part of any such trend. He's more interested in searching his soul, seeking God's will, and smoking trees to free his mind. He probably wouldn't consider himself a part of any such trend, but he might be part of a movement whether he likes it or not. At any rate Expressions (2012 A.U.) is really, really good; it's meandering, dusty soul-funk from a producer at the peak of his powers and an artist searching for a voice he might have already found.