Paeans for the present evade the shallowness of the “live in the moment” cliche, giving it the depth it always seems to lack elsewhere. Rather, it’s intent on negating all thoughts that might deter one from doing so. Really, the album is a meditation on the incubation of the artist, the internal negotiation of influences and one’s past necessary for the birth of art never seen before.Ĭopeæsthetic, the independently released and largely self-produced follow-up to Versis’ 2010 debut ( iLLCANDESCENT), is an album equally preoccupied with the genesis of art. There are shades of Burial, Trent Reznor, FlyLo, and Radiohead, but never full-color facsimile. The lines between analog and digital music are blurred beyond recognition.Īshby synthesizes his influences rather than stealing from them. His Yorkeian falsetto cuts through every the layer of his dense suites, imbuing each with the immediacy and fractured humanity often lost to the repetition of ear-bleeding bass and surreal time signatures. His Alpha Pup debut, Sightless, Unless, ranks among the best music cultivated in the still vibrant beat scene. Instead, he became enamored with the subharmonic frequencies that melt walls at Low End Theory. Toy Light (Walker Ashby), a Bay Area-bred 23-year-old and graduate of UCLA’s art program, could’ve had a career in painting or photography (he still might). Toy Light and Versis, both young and immeasurably gifted L.A. Paradoxically, this is also the reason that so many skilled and innovative musicians are undiscovered or poorly covered. Every artistic arena in the land of women, weed, and weather is flush with talent, but the surfeit of music made here each year is proof enough. It wasn’t true when Woody derided the inconsistency of the city’s architecture, and it wasn’t true when Troy Ave flopped.
Toy Light – Sightless, Unless / Versis – Copeaesthetic There are worse ways to age in music than attaining a level of cult status, but it’d be nice if a guy as talented as Jeremih wasn’t singing to himself. - DAN FROM THE INTERNETĥ0.
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Late Nights: The Album is the sound of an artist reaching his full artistic potential, if not his commercial peak. Cole), “Pass Dat,” “Impatient,” “Oui,” “Royalty,” or “Paradise” could keep a lesser artist’s career sustained for at least half a decade.
Late Nights: The Album is Jeremih flexing, relentlessly belting out hit after hit for an empty room. Jeremih making an album stocked with potential hit singles not manufactured by label execs seems like the stupidest gamble imaginable. It’s a genre that’s being run by at least four Drake derivatives desperately trying to unionize the industry plants and consolidate their power. The fact that R&B has been going through growing pains for at least the last five years is the music industry’s worst-kept secret. Instead, he decided to buck every trend and take the most complicated route to R&B success in 2015: making R&B.
Or he could just as easily have jumped the TumblR&B bandwagon as the genre’s elder statesman and done a world tour opening for Jhene “the human healing crystal” Aiko.
He could’ve become the guy who doubled down on the success of his hit single and marketed “Birthday Sex” artisanal cupcakes to hipsters. There are only a couple ways Jeremih could’ve aged out of the adolescent phase of his career. It remains one of this century’s greatest, nothing short of a miracle. It’s an album about survival by any means necessary. It’s a sentiment the original Black Messiahs could relate to in the late 60s and early 70s, but also one for appalled Americans in 2015 who have to live with hate mongers carrying 35% of a presidential primary, and sitting Supreme Court justices who believe minorities are better off at inferior universities.īlack Messiah is the struggle to reconcile this unbearable reality - at once confrontational (“1000 Deaths”) and escapist (The record’s “Que Sera”, “Back to the Future (Part 1)”). It’s an an album specific to that moment of state executions of black men, and will be sadly universal for the foreseeable future. Like one of those holiday classics on cable, you can jump in at anytime and follow it to its conclusion. And I can confidently say a year later Black Messiah is a worthy successor to Voodoo, while maintaining its independence and originality as a standalone masterwork. It’s not often that you get to write with an entire year to digest an album - to live with it and to gain a modicum of perspective. For me, this means it will live on as an end-of-the year classic. Its sudden release in the wake of the Darren Wilson and Daniel Pantaleo acquittals, came ten days before Christmas, following a 14-year hiatus. As far as I’m concerned, Black Messiah is a Christmas Madeleine, an album inextricably linked to the memory of its moment.
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