Even though we get Dilla in most of his stylistic phases-from Detroit boom-bap to Soulquarian meditations to the choppy rawness of his final L.A. It takes some real razor-walking finesse to try and chop such an instantly recognizable piece of Creedence like he does on “Motor City 7,” turning the familiar swamp-trudge groove of 1970’s “Run Through the Jungle” into the jumbled rhythmic gait of someone trying to jog on ice.Īs the tracks go on one after another, the jarring moments and back-to-the-drawing-board segments jump out as mood-breaking nuisances. Some of the beats are audacious in their experimentation, even if the execution’s a little dicey. “Motor City 13” glows with Dilla’s late-’90s clouds-of-bass warmth, and “Motor City 8” goes woozy with garage soul that feels at once delirious and peaceful. There’s a few highlights on Motor City, even if the untitled nature of the tracks and the individually-wrapped, flat sequencing don’t do much justice to Dilla’s history of focused vibe-building. For every track that points to a certain highlight of Dilla’s idiosyncratic griminess, there’s another that comes across like something he kept filed away because he didn’t feel it was ready for the public. Still, for every fleshed-out beat that would make for the backbone of a solid deep hip-hop album cut, there’s a piece of scrap music that barely registers as an interstitial. On the all-instrumental Motor City, all 19 rare and unreleased tracks were picked by Dilla’s mother herself, with Ma Dukes including a letter to her son in the artwork.
Through the seams of their after-the-fact assemblages, these releases cull styles from a decade or two ago, shaped into an approximation of the art Dilla was aiming for. The music might not tell us much, but it does provide a nice reminder of his impact and hopefully some funds to keep the bills paid for the Yancey family. We keep getting new fragments of Dilla’s work, and we try to piece together a narrative that makes sense. But even with the one-a-year pace we’ve been getting posthumous releases-the floodgates opening in earnest around 2012, concurrent with the release of embattled mixtape Rebirth of Detroit-one can’t help but wonder if there’s something deeper hiding in his vaults. We’re not remotely likely to get another Donuts out of the J Dilla archives.
0 kommentar(er)
