RJ Wheaton

In preparation for my upcoming contribution to Continuum’s 33 1/3 series, I’ve been rereading everything I’ve read—and written—related to the mid-90s British downtempo scene.

I came across an unpublished piece I wrote in 2004 about Stephanie McKay’s debut album, McKay, which was produced by Portishead’s Geoff Barrow and Earthling’s Tim Saul. Because much of what I wrote still stands—because the album still sounds fresh and new, because permanently holds a place on the iPod—I thought I’d post it here. McKay was one of those astonishingly good UK-produced R&B albums which, sinfully, never found the audience it deserved. It sits alongside Lewis Taylor’s debut album as one of those magnificent albums that will turn heads whenever you put it on. Highly recommended. Sadly not available on iTunes (though her new album is) but it looks like the Amazon UK MP3 store has it.

For all the eclecticism that distinguishes R&B as a musical style, the ‘mature’ end of the genre can be surprisingly staid. While relentless competition for pop success pulls in sounds from UK garage and Jamaican dancehall, the more upmarket neo-soul sound is rather more conservative. Artists like Alicia Keys and India Arie establish their credentials by nostalgic invocation of Stevie Wonder, while others—Jill Scott, Angie Stone—appear stuck in the 1998 Atlanta production template.

That is one reason why Stephanie McKay’s self-titled debut album is refreshing. The production is handled by two outsiders to the US R&B scene, Geoff Barrow and Tim Saul. Both of these men—as the producers behind Portishead and Earthling respectively—were closely involved in the ‘Bristol sound’ that was at the core of the short-lived trip-hop genre.

There is a freshness about McKay from the outset: vinyl cracks and pops announce an analogue sensibility missing in the post-Atlanta sound of Timbaland and The Neptunes, and somewhat bypassed by the acoustic mannerisms of Keys, Badu and Arie.

There is also a distinct difference in tempo. The songs which sound most like Portishead – “Tell Him”, “Sadder Day”, “Five Days Of Faith”, “Thadius Star”—join precisely-arranged minor-key chord stabs to soundtrack-esque strings. But above all they display an awareness of space that outlines trip-hop’s debt to dub, fore-grounding thunderous bass figures and Barrow’s crisp drum programming. The production on songs like “Sadder Day” is meticulous and strident: a sparse acoustic guitar loop opens, before breaking into ruptured bass tones, dramatic string arrangements, a rattling mandolin and a backing vocal racked up to sound like Portishead’s trademark theremin.

McKay, formerly of The Brooklyn Funk Essentials—and a sometime associate of Kelis and Talib Kweli—is certainly up to the challenge. In “Sadder Day” her vocal gradually builds from the throwaway breathiness of the opening lines—“I ain’t got no money / and I don’t care / I been sitt-in’ down in this well I swear”. She accelerates through the following line—“Now I ain’t gettin’ nothin’ but the same old shit every day”—before strutting behind the beat to haul the song into the chorus. Later she displays a tempered command of melisma, and enough wit to tease out the emotional implications of the song.

The match between the vocals and production is often flawless. “How Long” works around a moody altered piano chord that recalls Wu-Tang. But the lush strings at the back of the mix and the delicate chord changes suggest instead the 1970s Gamble & Huff Philadelphia soul sound. The vocal works its way between the two extremes before building to such intensity that it seems ready to puncture the mix. There’s a gorgeous middle eight, too, in which a thickly harmonized vocal—“What time is it? What time is it?”—syncopates against the same bass-piano loop and makes it seem to lilt and buck in its moorings.

Elsewhere, Mckay’s impressive vibrato on “Rising Tide” finds all the angles in a rather harsh, unnerving song—from hip-hop vocal ticks through nursery-rhyme chant and molasses-slow behind-the-beat blues.

The lyrics are mostly devoid of the sentimentally and cliche that mark much songwriting of this type. The more earnest tracks, which flirt with a kind of Five Percenter spiritualism, are less interesting. But in general, the lyrics are well-married to the production.  “Echo”, a hypnotically-underproduced protest song, recalls Nina Simone’s ability to marry uncompromising politics to charming simplicity.

There is certainly a retro feel to the album, even animating the more lightweight songs. The dancefloor bubblegum of “Thinking Of You” brings to mind the sound of London’s pre-trip-hop Soul II Soul crew. “Take Me Over” is an unironic and unassuming faux-reggae piece, based on the Dave and Ansel Collins’ “Double Barrel”. It comes dangerously close to pastiche.

This shouldn’t suggest that the album lacks any flavor of contemporary R&B. “Bluesin’ It” has a distinct Timbaland feel: discreet parcels of sounds push the beat forwards. The tightly-coiled vocal wraps itself around the taut guitar and organ licks, before breaking into a coy and playful lilt. “Loving You” opens with a lean, sparse digital beat that recalls some of Jay Dee’s production, although the chorus—with its gentle string line and breathy high-range vocal—sounds eerily like Minnie Ripperton.

As with the much of the mid-nineties Bristol sound, it’s hard to distinguish McKay‘s fond regard for its influences from a general feeling of nostalgic loss. In either event, the hand-on-heart retro aesthetic causes a strangely weightless feeling of freedom from context. It is this weightlessness that animates and buoys this refreshingly individual album.

Review at PopMatters:

If any of this material feels like pastiche, it is nevertheless very well done. There is just enough hip-hop to keep things grounded: the breaks at the start of “Freedom” have a pedigree that goes back to Mantronix. The attention to period texture is particularly refreshing, given the tide of neo-jazz schlock that is increasingly upon us: Riaan Volsoo’s bass is recorded with a wonderfully acoustic rattle and throb; Kelsey Jones’s trumpet and Jon Shenoy’s sax have a up-close spittle to match the density of the arrangements. Above all, the tracks themselves have a purpose that is typically missing from the worthiness of hard-bop revivalism or the meandering of jazz-influenced hip-hop. This is a solid meal, even if you can still pick out the ingredients.

 

Review of GB’s Soundtrack for Sunrise at PopMatters:

In general, what distinguishes the treatment of vocals in the garage-influenced genres is a willingness to let the production flex around the shape of the song. On one hand, this means that a vocal is not—as in much recent R&B—gridlocked by beats; it allows a song to rise and fall, rather than simply stop and start. Where the material is weak, though, it over-exposes the smoothness of the vocal delivery and the paucity of melodic construction.

Review up at PopMatters:

There has always been an unusual feeling of space at the center of Massive Attack’s sound, as if the music was somehow adjacent to its own emotional core. Even in their most brilliant work—Shara Nelson’s voice clearing a path through the ragged and magnificent string arrangements of “Unfinished Sympathy”—the music’s heart feels somehow misplaced. What remains is a hole that perfectly suggests a forlorn and radiant lovesickness. Their work isn’t as much a reproduction of grief or loss or anger or rapture, as it is a series of perfect, and perfectly evocative, outlines. For all the emotional gravity that their better songs bring to bear, it is an effect that is accrued, rather than immediately impressed. The effect is as disorientating as it is unique.

Album review of Jimmy Behan’s Days Are What We Live In at PopMatters:

Behan has supported Four Tet and Manitoba on tour, and shares much of the sonic vocabulary of “folktronica”. Days Are What We Live In has a crisp, clear upper mid-range; spare, sparse piano and keyboard figures dominate. There are the same splintered fractions of guitar licks and reversed fragments of sound that Four Tet has made its own. The album’s lower range is generally filled with warm, throbbing sounds; the effect should be hypnotic, cumulative. Drum sounds, when used, punctuate the shimmering structure.

And:

There are moments of great prettiness here. They remain opaque, which is both frustrating and quite deliberate: this music is all surface. It is meticulous, measured, finely-crafted. If it fails to move or arouse, that is as much a feature of the genre as it is a failing of imagination.

To get the ball rolling: 2004 was a great year for Jurassic 5 solo releases. Next year is going to be pretty good too — more on that later — but the highlights were certainly DJ Nu-Mark’s two projects.

Hands On was the increasingly obligatory ‘I have an album coming out’ mixtape, except that it was also an official release on Sequence Records, which brought us Automator’s Wanna Buy A Monkey? and Babu’s two Duck Season releases.

Hands On opens with some unselfconscious funk, including Organized Konfusion’s JBs-sampling “Fudge Funk”, and Rex Brown Company’s unrestrained clavinet workout “Hot Track”. (Clavinet: “the funkiest instrument known to man”?) A handful of Beatnuts- and Premier-produced skits and intros precede a slab of red-hot US hip-hop. There’s a guest spot by fellow J5 member Chali 2na. “Saliva”, the best track from Viktor Vaughn’s Vaudeville Villain, is produced by Rjd2 in Deadringer mode. And there’s Vitamin-D’s “No Good”: think you’re sick of sped-up vocal samples? Hear this.

Among the album’s highlights is the stretch of international hip-hop towards the end. There’s still something disconcerting about hearing a properly-practiced non-American flow; the accents fall across the beats in ways slightly — and therefore illuminatingly — different. Even MCs with a distinctively London delivery still stand out (on the other hand, there’s nothing more bland than a UK MC aping American delivery). But that’s nothing compared to the novelty of French, German and Aussie cadences and rhythms here. And there’s All Time High’s Ayrshire brogue, which I imagine must be unintelligable to the majority of listeners. Excellent.

Like Hands On, Blend Crafters is back-to-back crisp breakbeats and muscular basslines. The first track — “Melody” — is featured on Hands On. It’s a taut jam built around a stack of overlapping baritone vocal samples and a phat snare sound. “Lola” similarly stacks up and parcels out horn riffs. “Bad Luck Blues” takes the reedy vocal and winsome guitar riffs of Skip James’ Delta classic “Hardtime Killin’ Floor Blues”. The mechanical throb of “Shedding Skin” sounds like Chemical Brother’s “Piku”. And that’s just the first few tracks: there’s more, including a strangely touching corny piano-sax-beats cover of John Lennon’s “Imagine”. It should really say ‘EP’ on the tin, though — at 30:16 it runs a little too short.

As with Jurassic 5, there is something of the old-school about these releases: they are fun, funky, not too thoughtful, and not too self-important. They certainly more than fill the spot taken by 2003’s DJ Format/MC Abdominal collaborations.

In other J5 news, Chali 2na’s Fish Market mixtape had some high points. Cut Chemist’s Litmus Test (about half of it streamed at his official site) is a 28-minute cut-up of his best-known productions. Both of them are, presumably, efforts to soften up the market for solo albums (2na’s Fish Outta Water, Chemist’s The Audience Is Listening) due at the start of the next year. There is also a J5 album slated for May.

DJ Nu-Mark, Hands On
(Sequence, 2004)

DJ Nu-Mark & Pomo, Blend Crafters Volume One
(Up Above, 2004)

Chali 2na, Fish Market (mixed by DJ Dez)
(N/A, 2004)

Cut Chemist, The Litmus Test
(Tube, 2004)

From the Beth Gibbons mailing list:

Beth has been very busy this year taking the opportunity to work with other artists – writing the track ‘Killing Time’ for Joss Stone’s new album Mind, Body & Soul, writing and performing backing vocals on the track ‘Strange Melody’ for Jane Birkin’s new album ‘Rendez Vous’, co-writing and performing the track ‘Lonely Carousel’ with Rodrigo Leao for his new album ‘Cinema’ and co-writing the track ‘Love Is A Stranger’ with David Steel (of Fine Young Cannibals fame) for his current Fried album.

Currently in the midst of completing a film score for a French Film ‘L’Annulaire’ to be released in 2005 Beth is remarkably also finding the time to work on new tracks for Portishead!

Beth will be performing on November 20th and 21st in Lisbon and November 25th in Oporto, Portugal with Rodrigo Leao and there are unconfirmed plans for a one-off performance with Jane Birkin in Paris before the year end.

(Emphasis mine. The urge to copy-edit these things is strangely hard to resist.)

No doubt it’s just the latest in the long line of ‘they’re still working together’ rumours.

On the other hand, welcome to all those folks who are Googling for the “new Portishead album”.

Silence Is A Rhythm Two has Caribou’s remix of Junior Boys’ “Birthday”. Catch it while you can, especially if you missed the double-CD US release.

Caribou is Manitoba.

Via The Naugahyde Life, you can find DJ Cam remixes of Michael Jackson’s “You Rock My World” and Serge Gainsbourg’s “Ford Mustang” at Cam’s own Inflamable Records. It’s 2004’s clean and crisp DJ Cam, not 1995’s musty and blunted DJ Cam.

But hey, they’re free. And legit.

I’ve been meaning to write a ‘how to buy’ piece on the early Bristol sound for a little while now, but quite a few of the key early releases remain unavailable for the casual buyer. This career retrospective fills at least one gap, including as it does Fresh Four’s 1989 cover of the Rose Royce song “Wishing On A Star”.

Rob Smith and Ray Mighty helped establish the production template at the heart of the Bristol sound, pulling the melange of influences (hip-hop, dub, lovers’ rock, rare groove, soul, punk, Two-Tone ska) into something distinct and coherent. Their version of Erik Satie’s “Gymnopedie No. 1” was at the heart of “Stranger Than Love”, released in 1987 by Mark Stewart, a long-time member of the Bristol scene (and associate of Adrian Sherwood’s On-U Sound project). Along with The Wild Bunch’s “The Look Of Love” (1986), “Stranger Than Love” is considered by many the prototypical trip-hop record.

Smith & Mighty’s 1988 versions of the Bacharach/David torch songs “Walk On By” and “Anyone (Who Had A Heart)” built on “The Look Of Love”: crisp mid-80s hip-hop drum programming rivets down a wide-open arrangement that displays the dub influence; floating above is a dreamy, slightly distanced vocal track, taking full advantage of Bacharach’s airy and drifting intervals. Tim Simenon, of Bomb The Bass, was doing the same thing at the same time with “Say A Little Prayer.”

Smith & Mighty produced Massive Attack’s first single — a cover of Chaka Khan’s “Any Love” — and Fresh Four’s “Wishing On A Star”, which epitomized the formula and introduced (to ears outside Bristol) the signature muted, low-key rapping. The consequent commercial success brought a major-label record deal — with disastrous results. A series of protracted disagreements with London Records meant that Carlton’s 1991 LP The Call Is Strong was the only Smith & Mighty production released for years. In 1995 their contract expired and — with Peter D Rose — they issued Bass Is Maternal on their own More Rockers label. By that time Massive Attack, Portishead and Tricky, among others, had taken the Bristol sound to an international audience.

Most of Fresh Four went on to become key figures in the Bristol drum & bass scene — as, indeed, did Smith & Mighty. But the Fresh Four LP retains its reputation as the great unreleased Bristol sound album (rivaled until this year by Earthling’s Humandust). In all likelihood it doesn’t exist in any kind of completed form — but I bet there are some great masters locked up somewhere.

This is a career-spanning retrospective issued by the German !K7 label, with whom they have released two albums since 2000. Most of the material here is, inevitably, post-1995 drum & bass; most of that is from the !K7 releases. There is one track from Carlton’s The Call Is Strong, the Fresh Four single, and versions of the two central Bacharach covers (both of which are also on their highly-listenable DJ-Kicks mix).

When the BBC finally get their act together (or I’m on the p2p networks at the right time), I will finally be able to hear Smith & Mighty’s apparently epic 1996 Essential Mix.

Smith & Mighty, Retrospective
(!K7, 2004)

Smith & Mighty, DJ-Kicks
(!K7, 1998)