Five things to know about Ginger, by Brockhampton
Credit to Author: Stuart Derdeyn| Date: Tue, 03 Sep 2019 18:00:58 +0000
Brockhampton | Everything/RCA Records
The seven-piece San Marcos, Tex., hip-hop collective Brockhampton has done a fantastic job of marketing its boy-band-ish brand and displayed an increasingly tongue-in-cheek understanding of its place in the industry. Titling successive albums Saturation II and Saturation III pretty much let everyone in on the gig.
But vocalists Kevin Abstract, Matt Champion, Merlyn Wood, Dom McLennon, Joba, Bearface and others involved in the production have been honing skills over the band’s five albums, with Ginger a likely peak.
The dozen tracks range from spitfire to blunted weirdness with more than a fair bit of explicit language and some surprises. Here are five things to know about the album:
1: Boy Bye: This is one under-three-minute-long kicker with a totally addictive neo-bossa nova back track punctuated with a rising and dropping scale that could be guitar or a sampled Japanese koto, and one member after another ripping rhymes. If you toe isn’t tapping along, check your pulse.
2: Ginger: So the title track has fiercely auto-tuned vocals and a sample of some kind of mutant keyboard filling up the background and packs a surprising big choral vocal break that hits before the lyric. You just know that those angelic backing choirs will sound incredible in some club mix to come. Pure pop stylings for sure.
3: Instrumentation: As stated before, the choices the producers make in how to craft backing beats and loops for the material deserves props for keeping things interesting. The looped solo trumpet in If You Pray Right and metronome-on-meth percussion is super-slinky and is doubtless a live concert favourite because it just screams crowd-swaying.
4: No Halo: The love ballad standout with its neo-folky steel string guitar picking and smooth chorus could be a Coldplay tune with a few tweaks (and piano) and displays how this group manages to be considered both a rap crew, a boy band and an urban pop act at the same time. Its strengths enable genre-jumping and establish some individuality in each genre.
5: Heaven Belongs to You Tour: Catch the boys dropping songs from Ginger live in concert on Oct. 26, 7 p.m., PNE Forum. Tickets: $56.50 at livenation.com.
Also spinning this week:
Del Barber
Easy Keeper | delbarber.com
It takes a certain type to write a song about a “pork chop in the fridge getting kinda rank” and drywall needing patching that you want to listen to. Barber has that same kind of ragged and worn delivery that made a star out of Jackson Browne and his material has more than a little bit of ’70s-era Laurel Canyon country cool to it. A Western Canadian Music Award and Canadian Folk Music Award-winner with numerous JUNO nominations who deserves to be well-known everywhere, Barber has penned a potential country classic in the story song Ronnie and Rose. Kudos to whoever had the idea to throw in that ripping Zydeco-esque accordion.
Gordon Grdina Quartet
Cooper’s Park | Songlines
On this latest release, Vancouver’s celebrated guitar and oud improviser succeeds in crafting music that is both aggressive and frenetic, but also fragile and expansive. Ably backed by a crack crew from New York — Russ Lossing (piano/clavinet), Oscar Noriega (alto sax/bass clarinet), drummer Satoshi Takeshi — on five distinctive tunes, the music is never less than entrancing. Seeds II finds Lossing unleashing some really dirty clavinet while the rest of the band gets funky around him and keeps building up to a smooth, surprisingly quiet solo. The closer Night Sweats continues along this line with some really killer electric shredding. Overall, this is the most progressive rock sound of any of Grdina’s work. But don’t be thinking Genesis, think some intense French art rock crew like Magma or Eskaton.
Surefire Sweat
Surefire Sweat | surefiresweat.com
Juno-nominated drummer Larry Graves of Toronto drives this hard-hitting quintet through a slamming set of instrumentals that come from the point where Fela’s Afrobeat, Brecker Brothers’ fusion and a dash of funk converge. The impeccably played songs seem to run longer than their length due to the sheer density of what’s going on in them. In For All the Times I Never Came to See You, Graves and percussionist Dave Chan just keep pushing while Liam Smith’s electric bass just pumps, while guitarist Paul MacDougall, trumpeter Brad Eaton, baritone sax Marcus Ali throw in quick jabs until tenor sax player Elena Kapeleris drops a killer solo. This is heavy.
Waingro
III | Sludgelord Records/No List Records
Named after a character in director Michael Mann’s movie Heat, this Vancouver crew plays like its 1999 again. This is stoner rock by way of true Seattle grunge, loud (very), thrashing, angry and sounding like it’s verging on falling apart. The band favours faster tracks — check the single Red Death about a particularly rank form of street meth — but can get full-on Melvins when it wants to, such as on Third Veil.