Bilal – In Another Life

★★★★

New York’s Bilal Oliver has been a relatively unknown quantity for the greater part of his career, a time span that stretches back to his debut album in 2001. He had been a hot item back in the early oughts, when his sophomore album, Love For Sale, was slated to be on Interscope and was to feature production work from such luminaries as J. Dilla and Dr. Dre. When Bilal opted to scrap those plans and produce an album built around his own instrumentation, Interscope balked and the album went unreleased. Such a reversal has set back any number of artists in a similar situation, so when 2010 rolled around and Bilal released another album, it was nice just to hear new music from him. Since then, however, he’s put in time working – albums, singles, and appearances on the tracks of much bigger names. He climbed back up the industry ladder rung by rung until he hit a breakthrough this year; Kendrick Lamar’s cultural touchstone To Pimp A Butterfly features quite a bit of work from Bilal, and it’s thrust his name back into the limelight.

All that “comeback from a career-ending event” stuff is heartwarming, to be sure, but it doesn’t mean a damn if it’s not capitalized upon. In Another Life capitalizes. Bilal’s tastes run through a swampy concoction of soul, funk, jazz, and R&B, and the work displayed on the album showcases that perfectly. The singer found exactly the right producer in Adrian Younge, whose gritty soul-sampling work brought Ghostface Killah out of the mid-career doldrums on the two Twelve Reasons To Die albums. The same core beats can be found on In Another Life, but Younge retools it to be lighter, more soulful than street-level. While the synth-and-snare crackle of “Sirens II” could easily have hosted GFK’s cluttered, menacing flow, it’s a more than ample bed for Bilal’s smooth, streetlight voice. It’s this particular formula that provides the best moments of the album: “Sirens II”, “Star Now”, “Satellites”, “Lunatic”, and the Kendrick Lamar “hit ya back” epic “Money Over Love”.

Call it a comeback. This is the apex (so far) of everything Bilal’s been working towards, and if there’s any justice it’ll get him more work in higher profile settings. If you’re a fan at all of any of the kitchen sink of genres that Bilal is bringing to the table, you owe it to yourself to check In Another Life out.

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Hiatus Kaiyote – Choose Your Weapon

★★★

The neo-psychedelic haven of Melbourne, Australia is also home to the Grammy-nominated “Future Soul” group Hiatus Kaiyote, whose second album, Choose Your Weapon, is making people go “like, wow”. There’s some good reason for the hype: Hiatus Kaiyote crafts some next-level soul music out of the cutting-edge sounds of contemporary hip hop and R&B and then adds the funk-mining groove that the group is best known for. When gets into a serious thing, it’s some of the best head-nodder music you’ll find.

The problem, though, is that beyond an unearthly ability to find their way into the pocket there isn’t much to recommend on Choose Your Weapon. Tracks like “Shaolin Monk Motherfunk” and “Atari” are stone killers, but there’s sixty-nine minutes of tracks just like them, and after a while it wears thin. By the time “Building A Ladder” comes along it’s exhausting, and you’re left feeling tired and aimless. Choose Your Weapon is at its heart a groove in search of a message, or an anthem, or something to bring it up to the next level and turn them from a pretty great jam into a band worth encapsulating on an album. Choose Your Weapon feels like a demo reel of its maker’s talents, which is unfortunate when you consider those talents.

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Van Hunt – The Fun Rises, The Fun Sets

★★★★

2014-2015 is already shaping up to the be the year that cool, slinky funk slips back into the hipster playlists of the world. Between D’Angelo’s Black Messiah and Kendrick’s To Pimp A Butterfly the sounds of the early 1970s are coming back in a big way. Add in Van Hunt to this conversation. Hailing from Dayton, OH – home of Guided By Voices! – Van Hunt has been on an upward swing since the early 00s through a judicious usage of soul, funk, R&B, and smooth sexuality. He’s also the poster boy for talent being screwed around by major labels; after two albums with Capitol Records he was shuffled around to a subsidiary label and his third album, Popular, was shelved despite being a solid album by all accounts. Van Hunt struck out on his own afterwards, turning to crowdfunding to get The Fun Rises, The Fun Sets made. Thank god for a generous internet, because this is one rewarding album.

It’s a subtle album, full of understated percussion, slinky basslines, versatile keyboard work, and expertly integrated guitar lines, almost all of which are played by Van Hunt himself. It’s a tour de force for a talented man, a modern day disciple of Prince with a hint of both Sly Stone and David Bowie. The Prince influence is the big one though; subtle and restrained as The Fun Rises, The Fun Sets is, it is absolutely awash in sexuality. In that it sets itself apart from the political and cultural examinations of America that characterize both Black Messiah and To Pimp A Butterfly. This is the bedroom addition of the modern retro-funk movement, the freak in the sheets in contrast to the righteous movement in the streets.

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Kendrick Lamar – To Pimp A Butterfly

★★★★★

Sometime over the past few years, trap music has become the dominant form in hip hop. As a subgenre it owes everything to spare, menacing beats, MIDI-triggered snare rolls that resemble the chatter of assault rifle fire, and a sing-song flow of drug-game braggadocio and ignorance that is infinitely more Soulja Boy than Sista Souljah. It’s a cathartic form, to be sure, but in the wake of several high-profile killings of unarmed black men by the police (and police wannabes) in America, it has little to offer in the way of commentary besides more nihilism. It’s no wonder then, perhaps, that there has been a recent movement towards the past, a retreat that suggests that the inspiration for progress might be better mined from earlier forms of black music. Joey Bada$$ went back to the gritty streets of New York in the 1990s; D’Angelo enlisted The Vanguard and went back to the conscious movement days of the late 1960s and early 1970s, specifically Sly and the Family Stone, hard soul, and quiet storm; Flying Lotus turned back to a kaleidoscope of jazz forms, and even Kanye has reached back (slightly) in his apparent embrace of British grime.

Then there’s King Kendrick, the man who brought Compton back to the limelight with what was easily the best album of 2012, good kid m.A.A.d. city. That was an album of hard beats and hood politics, a grandiose concept album that summed up what was best about pre-trap hip hop. To Pimp A Butterfly is not that album – it’s an entirely different thing altogether.

Right from the beginning you can smell the p-funk – squelchy instruments, stomping basslines, ass-shaking grooves. Lamar isn’t even subtle about where he’s going – he’s got Parliament/Funkadelic madman George Clinton right there, guesting on it. Then there’s what can best be described as a spoken word poetry piece over squalling jazz improvisation. Then “King Kunta” comes on and conquers the world with one groove. This is Kendrick Lamar, 2015: willing to scribble madly outside the lines, not content to simply be a commercialized unit, making a name for himself as an honest-to-god artist.

That’s what the album seems to be about, incidentally: the constant conflict between Kendrick Lamar, the rapper who made it up out of the streets of Compton, shattered expectations, and became widely recognized as the leading light of hip hop, and Kendrick Lamar, the guy from the streets, still caught up in petty beefs and those hood politics from good kid m.A.A.d. city, a man who abandoned his friends and family to live and die in L.A. while he puffed himself up and toured the world. On one side, “u”, which features a second verse where he breaks down and raps while sobbing, screaming at himself in a hotel mirror about how he failed, he let down everyone he knew, how he wasn’t there when the people he cared about bled out and died. On the other side, “i”, which is much better on the album than it ever was as a single: the To Pimp A Butterfly version has a serious dance groove running through it, making the declarations of self-confidence, love, and the world being more than slow suicide all the more powerful. The conflict is given poetic roots at the very end, following the “interview” Kendrick conducts with Tupac Shakur for the last five minutes of “Mortal Man”. He identifies the caterpillar, the hard part of him that scrambles to survive in the “mad city” of L.A., the part that constantly looks for ways to survive. The butterfly, then, is the beautiful, artistic, human part inside of him, the talent that is only looking for an outlet. Being hardened by the struggles of life in the mad city, the caterpillar only looks for ways to pimp the butterfly out, to use it to continue the survival of the caterpillar. Trapped inside the cycle of thoughts that this produces, the only way out is for the caterpillar to use the butterfly to bring new ideas and ways back to the mad city, and to free itself from the stagnancy of the past.

It’s a heavy concept far removed from the surface-level nihilism that has infected hip hop for the past several years, and I think that’s kind of the point. Lamar conjures up the old ideals of race consciousness and unity, taking specific aim at the idea of dividing a people by arbitrary and useless lines: on “Mortal Man”, he says “While my loved ones was fighting the continuous war back in the city, I was entering a new one / A war that was based on apartheid and discrimination / Made me wanna go back to the cities and tell the homies what I’d learned / The word was respect / Just because you wore a different gang colour than mines / Doesn’t mean I can’t respect you as a black man”. On “Complexion” he discusses the ridiculousness inherent in discussing who’s “more black” than the next person, and segregating each other based on the darkness of skin. “Hood Politics” sets out the bigger picture beyond the constant infighting between street gangs: “From Compton to Congress it’s set trippin’ all around / Ain’t nothin’ new but a flow of new DemoCrips and ReBloodLicans / Red state vs. a blue state, which one you governin’? / They give us guns and drugs, call us thugs / Make it they promise to fuck with you / No condom they fuck with you / Obama say “What it do?”. On “The Blacker The Berry” Kendrick turns the finger on himself, calling himself a hypocrite for preaching black politics and mourning the death of those like Trayvon Martin when gangbanging caused him to kill another black man and set back unity just as much as any external enemy.

To Pimp A Butterfly is the most powerful album released in some time, an examination of the state of local and national race politics and an examination of the meaning of the conflict between art and money. Married to mutant funk, jazz, and soul, it uses old music to sound new again, in turn escaping the useless cycle of money and violence between rival sets to embrace a much wider scope of “us vs. them” – the struggle between the downtrodden and those that seek to keep them down. It’s much more than simply a worthy followup to good kid m.A.A.d city – it’s takes a gigantic leap forward to establish a much fuller circle with which to define Kendrick Lamar’s artistry as a whole.

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of Montreal – Aureate Gloom

★★★

“Bassem Sabry”, the opening track to of Montreal’s fifteenth album, is a red herring of the highest sort. It’s wah-laden guitars and disco rhythms make you think that, after the garage-inspired reset of Lousy With Sylvianbriar, the band was returning to the psych-funk sounds they established on Skeletal Lamping, False Priest, and Paralytic Stalks. At the same time, with its focus on an Egyptian political activist, the casual listener could be forgiven for thinking that the focus might not be on frontman Kevin Barnes for a change.

Neither is true. This is an album that dives into New York City in the septic days of the late 1970s and early 1980s: cigarette-stained glam-punk, drugged-out disco dens, street-sweat funk riffs, and damn the torpedoes rock and roll. It’s a record of volume, fuzz, and widescreen ambitions, and it centres around Barnes’ failed marriage to the Norwegian woman he first bled his heart out about on the band’s breakthrough album, 2007’s Hissing Fauna, Are You The Destroyer? Barnes has always had a habit of being overwrought when it comes to his lyrics (and his song titles), but on Aureate Gloom he takes that tendency to an unfortunate extreme. “Empyrean Abattoir” features lines like “Before your hysterical silence, you came rapping at my door / With your body as a sacrament, your mind a killing floor” and something about “stealing from his aureation of filth” after “masturbating your father’s pain”. What? “Virgilian Lots” compares the stability that Barnes and his wife once enjoyed to “the twin volcanoes of Cuauhnahuac”; on the next track, “Monolithic Egress”, he compares them to “the raping of the embryonic virgin spring”. The effect is rather like reading the intensely personal breakup diary of a kid (a 40-year-old kid at that) who desperately wants to be published in The Paris Review.

Aureate Gloom takes of Montreal in an interesting musical direction, one where Tom Petty and The Kinks jam with Chic and the past remains as always a grotesque animal. What it really bodes well for its the next album, the one after Barnes gets his divorce novel out of his system. The musical balancing act on display here is marred by his precocious-teenager divorce lyrics, and as a fiction writer capable of writing some pretty overwrought lines myself, it takes a lot to call someone out on that.

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ThEESatisfaction – EarthEE

★★★☆

ThEESatisfaction are a smoky alternative R&B duo from Seattle who first caught the attention of the venerable Sub Pop label through a guest appearance on Shabazz Palace’s modern classic Black Up. EarthEE, the duo’s second album, brings them out from the shadow of their origins and establishes them as a laid-back amalgamation of 70s jazz, soul, and afro-funk. There aren’t many clear-cut hooks here, just a lot of hand drums and throbbing bass – in some places, courtesy of supreme bass player Meshelle Ndegeocello. Soft synth work abounds, providing a cushion between the insistent grab of the bass and the on-the-edge-of-space vocals of Catherine Harris-White. “No GMO”, “Planet For Sale”, “Blandland”, and “Post Black Anyway” all speak to the politics lurking beneath the chilled-out vibe, marking them out as significantly more interesting than your average alt-R&B project. EarthEE makes a great soundtrack for all sorts of fun activities, although the songs seem to run together after a while.

Mark Ronson – Uptown Special

★★★☆

The UK producer gets intimate with the funk of the Seventies and Eighties on his fourth album, weaving thumping bass lines under stacks of, uh, Stax guitar, horny synth work, and a laundry list of guest stars ranging from the supreme (Stevie Wonder, Bruno Mars) to the unknown (Keyone Starr, whose “I Can’t Lose” more than holds its own coming after megahit “Uptown Funk”). Uptown Special is the soundtrack of a night of liquor and love, from the sax-fuelled sunset of “Uptown’s First Finale” to the bleary stumble out into the dawn of “Crack In The Pearl, Pt II” – a pretty standard conceit, to be sure, but how many such albums have lyrics written by Michael “The Yiddish Policeman’s Club” Chabon? It’s these little quirks – “I wrote to Stevie Wonder and now he’s on the album!”, “I have Michael Chabon write the lyrics!”, “I have Mystikal conjuring up the ghost of James Brown!” – that elevate the album from simple Prince worship to something a little more sublime. Not too sublime, now; there’s something unpleasantly languid about tracks like “Daffodils” and “In Case of Fire” that don’t gel well with the ass-shaking bottom end present elsewhere, and at times it seems like Ronson couldn’t decide whether to make a pure party album or a pure sex-jam album so he decided to do both simultaneously. That decision doesn’t quite work, but it almost does, and it’s as funky a pop album as you’re going to find all summer anyway. Better get used to it.