It’s a Tuesday night at River Gods, a cozy pub in Cambridgeport, and the room is packed. Friends and fans have turned up to celebrate the release of Edan’s Primitive Plus (Solid Records), a new album by the Boston-based multi-tasking hip-hop MC/DJ/producer. The midweek listening party is sponsored by the left-field record store Other Music, which over the previous weekend suddenly and mysteriously vanished from its Harvard Square storefront. As a result, the mood is equally celebratory and melancholy, with former employees cursing Cambridge’s skyrocketing retail rents and the sour economic climate over pints of beer. Edan, however, is in a good mood, and he’s dressed up for the occasion — this thin, bespectacled, white MC is wearing a shaggy brown wig and a light-blue short-sleeved shirt with skinny green tie and a single white carnation. The effect is pure thrift-store goofy — low-budget dress-up for shits and giggles. "This is the best album you’ll ever hear," he boasts, a swagger in his voice, as he hands me a copy of his other new album, Fast Rap (self-released), a blitzkrieg mix tape of, uh, fast rap tracks. Pausing for effect, he adds: "At least, the first six times you listen to it."

That short interchange tells me a lot about Edan the Humble Magnificent. Almost comically confident, the Boston-based MC cuts hip-hop’s standard braggadocio with a fierce ironic and absurdist streak, turning battle raps into dizzying bursts of off-the-wall rhymes and goofy juxtapositions. To put it in criticspeak: he fuses the polyrhythmic silver-tongued flow of hip-hop’s cerebral fringes (Aceyalone, Anti-Pop Consortium), the retro mood of the neo-traditional underground (Jurassic 5, Dilated Peoples), and the irreverent, ironic pose of its post-gangsta troublemakers (Eminem, Kool Keith). With one hand in the past and the other flippin’ the bird, he brings a much-needed sense of humor to Boston’s — make that the nation’s — indie hip-hop scene, a movement caught in a dour rut it can’t seem to get out of. To that he says: "I love shit that puts a smile on my face. You can’t be serious all the time, ya know? Do you mind if I eat this muffin while we talk?"

Like thousands of young musicians, Edan Portnoy came to Boston to attend Berklee. And like many of those hopeful adolescents, he left the music school without graduating. "I got in by playing bass and guitar, but I didn’t want to play guitar like everyone else over there, so I got into studying production and engineering, but then I realized that I didn’t want to produce other people’s shit."

He did, however, produce "Sing It Shitface" (Biscuithead, 1999), a Slim Shady–esque slab of rattling lo-fi rap with a Japanese hook and an overabundance of fart jokes. It didn’t make a lot of noise around here, but along with his follow-up singles, it created a substantial buzz in Britain, and that led to a record deal with British label Lewis Recordings and glowing press ("Hip-hop’s deadliest one-man arsenal," one scribe gushed). The end result: Edan makes "best of" lists and packs shows across the Atlantic, but the guy rarely surfaces in his home town. "They treat me nice over there," he says with little excitement, "They fly me out, they give me respect as an artist, and the shows pay all right."

It’s easy to understand why Britain is so gung-ho about this guy: Edan feeds that country’s pre-’92 hip-hop obsession with raw beats and bigger-than-life boasts that recall Golden Age heroes like Ultramagnetic MCs and Big Daddy Kane. Plus, he name-checks obscure rap acts like TDS Mob and Percee P with a knowing wink that makes the pasty-faced trainspotters smile. But the punk-ass troublemaker in him can’t let them off the hook, so he also rags on the nerdy obsessiveness of the crate-digging community. "Yo, I got this cheeseburger autographed by Slick Rick man," he boasts on "Ultra ’88," a "lost" Kool Keith track from Primitive Plus. "It’s still in the freezer, yo! I’m gonna sell that shit!"

Edan’s brash attitude also pops up in his recording æsthetic, a "shitty is pretty" style that emphasizes chicken-scratch guitars, head-smacking drums, and tweaked vocals that make him sound like a mischievous, helium-baked imp. Throw in the heavy dub effects and red-lining guitar riffs and it sounds like primitive psych-rock colliding with skeletal Cold Chillin’ tracks. "That old hip-hop is really warm and direct. It’s intimate, you’re not distanced from the music because of a polished sound, you’re getting someone’s aura right off the record. You know like certain stuff that’s done poorly has a lot of mystique? Like B-movies and Godzilla flicks. It’s like that; you start to appreciate and adore the fuck-ups and imperfections. That’s the stuff that makes you feel human. I don’t want that crystalline million-dollar sound, I need that kinda warm and intimate sound to feel good about music."

And whereas fellow retro-minded underground acts like People Under the Stairs or Jurassic 5 can’t escape their Golden Age tunnel vision, Edan embraces a distinctly contemporary rhyme style. The rough-cut beats might feel like ’82, but his fluid, quick-tongued flow is distinctly ’02. "Tackle any deficit/Rap mentally infamous/Backpedaling pessimist with venomous predicates benefit the nemesis with reticent percentages of sentences," he blurts on "Syllable Practice." More important, Primitive Plus never gets bogged down in boring, indier-than-thou moralizing. Edan would rather provoke laughter than lecture, so the album is slathered in smart-ass irony, tongue-in-cheek gangsta-isms, and snotty one-liners — "MCs approach me hungry/I proceed to feed them anal snacks," he promises on "Key-Bored" — that usually deal with farting, sucking, or stealing. On "#1 Hit Record," he crams ass jokes, dirty socks, parakeets, the Silver Surfer, and Vietnam vet midgets into a single, off-the-cuff verse. Edan might not be saying much of importance, but at least he’s up front about it. "I’m about to get into this song called ‘Syllable Practice,’ " he says over a rattling drum loop. "What that means is that I’m not going to say anything significant, but it’s gonna sound pretty." Yes it is.

MC KABIR could well be the only Italian-Indian hip-hop artist out there. He’s definitely the only Wesleyan-educated hip-hop MC whose father is a Nobel Prize–winning economist. The eclectic background comes crashing together on his first hip-hop album, Cultural Confusion (Uncle Trouble), a self-produced, idealistic, multi-culti, agit-rap fusion that could only come from Cambridge.

Familiar to local audiences from his previous band, the funk-soul act Uncle Trouble, Kabir indulged his hip-hop jones and began writing rhymes a couple years ago. "I found myself getting a lot of inspiration from hip-hop artists. And all of my lyrics were coming out in rhymes, not songs. So I just started writing hooks and then speaking what I want to speak about in raps." Although the funk-soul band is gone, elements remain: Kabir’s swiftly moving rhymes rise and fall with a husky melodic cadence that’s resolutely soulful. On "Resolution," rubbery raps collide with a bluesy descending hook that slyly ingratiates itself into your brain.

As a live act, Kabir maintains the hybrid sound, performing with a four-piece line-up that includes two members of the local jazz-jam group the Miracle Orchestra. This means that he appears on bills with crunchy jam bands as well as rowdy hip-hop acts, but he doesn’t seem to mind. "I’m proud to represent the Boston hip-hop scene, but there’s a lot more to the world than hip-hop, a lot of other types who could appreciate my music. As a performer, the band is more challenging, the energy of live musicians can take the music in different directions than just performing with a DJ."

Jumping from the soul-searching title track to a globetrotting narrative ("Millennium Travels") to a rap-as-art manifesto ("A.R.T."), Cultural Confusion represents Kabir’s middle-class collegiate and mixed-heritage background without diluting the hip-hop essence. "If you’re gonna put out a record, you have to come correct, which means different things for different people. I think it means putting out a record that reveals the type of person you are. I represent India and Cambridge, and maybe that’s not as hard as saying, ‘I represent the South Bronx,’ but that’s who I am and I’m not ashamed of it."

THE FLOOD OF LOCAL HIP-HOP releases continues this spring with two full-lengths from Brick Records. Lowell’s D-Tension has fed the Boston hip-hop revival as the booker/promoter for Bill’s Bar’s regular hip-hop nights and as a producer for both local and national indie artists. He connects the two skills on his debut compilation, the just-released Contacts + Contracts (Brick), which snags an all-star cast of underground rhyme spitters including Encore, Mr. Lif, Esoteric, L-Fudge, and Apani B. Fly. D-Tension is razor-sharp throughout, turning out sleazy strip-club bounce for Thirstin Howl’s "Orgasm," jittery piano funk for Breez Evahflowin’ on "Open," and, best of all, a luscious pitch-shifted soul loop for Encore’s blazing "It’s Time," which alone is worth the price of admission. He doesn’t fare too badly on the mike either, laying out his sartorial style on "My Fashion Statement" (it’s more Garment District than Gucci).

Also on Brick, MC/producer Insight’s double-disc Updated Software V. 2.5 is scheduled for April 23. Disc two’s instrumentals are strictly for the producers, but disc one finds Insight laying his cool, observant tenor over 17 cuts of dirt-encrusted chopped-up beats that sound like DJ Premier dragged through the gutter.

D-Tension and Kabir will perform tonight, April 11, at the NEMO Hip-Hop Showcase downstairs at the Middle East, 480 Mass Ave in Central Square. Edan will be at the Middle East a week from Monday, April 22. Call (617) 864-EAST.