One of hip hop’s most bizarre figures enlists old friends and a dead poet for latest effort.

Born Like This echoes with the ghost of Charles Bukowski. The notoriously miserable poet even makes a posthumous appearance on the song “Cellz,” reading his poem “Dinosauria, We.” Passages like “born into this/ into hospitals which are so expensive that it’s cheaper to die/ into lawyers who charge so much it’s cheaper to plead guilty/ into a country where the jails are full and the madhouses closed” add a concrete weight to an album that already extends the gangsta rap fantasy into a surreal world where songs are spliced together with interludes from children’s cartoons, police reports and CNN war updates. The beats alternate between frantic funk, like the Raekwon collaboration “Yessir!,” and moody keyboard tracks, like “Ballskin” and the endearing “That’s That,” based on a short piano piece from Montreal’s Galt MacDermot. Like Bukowski and his carefully cultivated barfly persona, Daniel Dumille has immersed himself in his MF Doom alter-ego (now simply Doom) to such an extent that it is hard to determine where one ends and the other begins. Unlike Bukowski, Doom’s world view has attracted more than its fair share of collaborators, from Prince Paul and Posdnous, to Ghostface Killah and Paloma Faith, all willing to recast themselves as four-colour criminal characters to produce an utterly fascinating album.