On Elegance

J. Edward Keyes on Shuffle

by J. Edward Keyes

	print	email	reply	rss feed

Published: Feb 19, 2008

The most alarming thing about The Talk of New York, the latest mixtape from the Brooklyn rapper Boom P, is that its best beat is lifted from a song by Fort Minor, the hip-hop side project of Linkin Park's Mike Shinoda. This is not a slight on the rest of the material: P is an agile rapper (with a terrible name), and he skips across the top of these tracks with alarming ease. It's just that "Long Time Comin'" represents a particular apex, so it's somewhat dismaying that it took one-fifth of a rap-rock group to get him there.

Boom P The Talk of New York (Mixtape)

Headlights Some Racing, Some Stopping (Polyvinyl)

Boom P is the kind of rapper who behaves as if the '90s never ended, and as such will always find a place in the heart of certain critics (i.e. this one). The Talk of New York has the same kind of fluidity and urgency as Prodigy's Revenge of Tha Yardfather, which probably means that Boom P's full-length isn't coming out any time soon, either. Over the course of New York's 18 songs, he bends a series of hip-hop productions to his will. His rhymes come in tight clusters, one syllable after the other, so that his rhyme schemes look like battery sizes (AA AA AA). Take, for instance, the song that jacks Fort Minor: "[God] don't answer me back/ All I see is poverty, AIDS, cancer and crack/ Undercover cops in a rage, hammers that clap/ I feel like a slave, I'm handling scraps." A few of his verses could do with a bit more elegance, but his passion and delivery more than compensate.

Elegance is not an issue for the Illinois trio Headlights. Some Racing, Some Stopping, their second record, is the best argument for rustic songwriting since "Bron-Yr-Aur." Conceived and recorded in a farmhouse just outside of Champaign, the record has a kind of feathery ease that would be just right for springtime if it weren't the middle of February. As it is, though, Some Racing, Some Stopping is light as cloud cover, blown gently along by the hushed vocals of Erin Fein and Tristan Wraight. It's C86 dressed up for Easter Sunday, the fuzz scrubbed clean away, leaving just gleaming guitars and sparkling synths. It's a full-length redemption of the word "lovely."

(j_keyes@citypaper.net)

Main Squeeze
Adam Arcuragi
Soundadvice
St. Vincent
The Austerity Program
The Loved Ones
Juilliard Quartet