A long day at work was mitigated by a lovely ride home with the top down and listening to this next album for the last time, albeit with some fondness.
Disc 1934 is…Beauty and the Beat
Artist: Edan
Year of Release: 2005
What’s up with the Cover? A collage of heads and some swirly colours.
How I Came To Know It: I discovered Edan through his other record, “Primitive Plus” (reviewed back at Disc 1871). I was on a search for that record when I found this one instead. I was jonesing for some Edan that day, and decided to buy it on spec, and hope for the best.
How It Stacks Up: I have two of Edan’s three studio LPs. Of the two, “Beauty and the Beat” is #2.
Ratings: 3 stars
A rapper with a creative flow is a rare and precious thing. One that can blend the dense rhyming you might expect from MF Doom with the furious beat forward delivery of Big Daddy Kane? Well, sign me up.
That’s what Edan brings to the table, and things were primed for me to have a good time except for that all elusive key third ingredient – killer beats. As a result you get a four star talent with some two star creative traditions. The result had me marveling at the brilliance of Edan’s flow, while bemoaning the record that might have been had he been just a little less experimental.
First, to the flow. Edan has an innate and natural talent that on the surface flows through bars with apparent disregard for even the basics of pocket awareness. However, it is all an illusion. In fact, his phrasing is next-level complex, climbing up, down and through complex time signatures with the skill of a jazz master.
And yeah, I know, I sometimes throw shade at jazz, but that doesn’t mean I don’t admire their talent to turn music into high math. That ain’t easy, and neither is what Edan gets up to.
He also does it with a frantic, urgent delivery that is on the very edge of losing the line without ever doing so. It isn’t that Edan never takes a breath – he just takes them in weird places that make it all the more interesting as you hang on for dear life and try to pay attention.
And you’ll want to pay attention, because his rhymes are dense and brilliant. At first blush you might be tempted to think he’s just throwing as many rhymes as he can into a sentence, but you quickly realize the whole thing has a purpose. It’s an art-infused purpose mind you -a free-form inspired stream of consciousness that somehow holds a plot together amid all the chaos.
That all sounds pretty good, but it’s a house built on a foundation of noise art that I just couldn’t get behind. Video game sounds, percussion on what sounds like random objects, jazz samples and amorphous feedback gurgles. There is a lot going on, but what isn’t happening is a consistent grounding beat.
So while that complex soup of sounds is working overtime in Edan’s head, and showcasing his brilliance, there are precious few songs you can tap your foot to. Listening you are struck by how intelligently constructed this record is, but it is also exhausting.
I get it - Edan does not want to make it easy on himself or on you. Like any art, music should challenge you. I just found it too much work and, at times, too clever for its own good.
The signs of this are there on his previous record, “Primitive Plus” but as the name of that record suggests, Edan was paying homage to earlier forms through his new and intriguing style. The tension of old and new works there, and the songs that have a similar approach on “Beauty…” like “Fumbling Over Words that Rhyme” and “Torture Chamber” capture the same magic.
But too often in his pursuit of a new and complex beauty, Edan leaves behind the basics of the beat. It’s deliberate, and it is done very well, but that doesn’t mean I liked it.
And so I am going to reluctantly part with this record, just like years ago when I parted with that bottle of Ardbeg on my scotch shelf. I was tempted to keep it because it looked good and suggested I was cool enough to handle all that complex peat. But the truth is that while I admired it, I didn’t enjoy it. Just like this record.
Best tracks: Fumbling Over Words that Rhyme, Torture Chamber, Making Planets
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