Album: Wax Tailor – Hope & Sorrow

advertisement

Like any form of musical experimentation, instrumental-based Hip Hop albums can be very hit and miss. They can either be fulfilling collections of musical collages that can achieve wonders without the aid of vocalists, think DJ Shadow’s Endtroducing, or they can wind up becoming nothing more than faceless background music.

Luckily for veteran French DJ and producer Wax Tailor, he showed enough restraint and technical ability that his 2005 debut Tales of the Forgotten Melodies avoided being a casualty. Adopting a similar approach, while broadening his horizons and utilizing the talents of several vocal performers, Wax Tailor has created an entertaining and sophisticated project with Hope & Sorrow.

The fantastically breezy Positively Inclined is possibly the best of his concoctions on this release, as it marries his loves of scratching and vocal samples with hard-hitting drums and rich instrumentation, going in an interesting direction while maintaining his Hip Hop roots. He is joined on this journey by entertaining yet inoffensive Hip Hop duo ASM (A State of Mind) and one of his frequent collaborators, ultra-talented instrumentalist Marina Quaisse.

All of the featured artists put in solid performances throughout, most notably Sharon Jones (minus the Dap Kings) who pours her soul all over the opening cut The Way We Lived. Ursula Rucker lends her unique spoken word poetry stylings to the socially and politically fuelled We Be. It is indeed a refreshing musical detour, but tends to linger into self-righteous coffee shop blandness at times.

Much like his 2005 effort several of the tracks are without vocalists, simply comprising of an original beat accompanied by carefully selected audio snippets from 1940s/50s films and some turntable trickery thrown in for good measure. Depending on your listening tastes you will either finds these musical excursions to be very clever and entertaining or you will think they are tiresome and at times irritating. This reviewer is leaning more towards the first description, although I could see how people would find them grating.

The best of all the instrumental-driven tracks would have to be the very well crafted The Tune, which as the name suggests has a woman trying to describe a tune she has in her head. What ensues is an orgy… of amusing audio snippets, with some Del the Funky Homosapien thrown in for good measure. From a purely instrumental standpoint Sometimes is the strongest of all the tracks, with it’s tense cinematic style just crying out for an MC.

With all that said, there is one identifiable quality that puts this album above many other current releases, the fact that it is a full album experience and not a collection of singles padded by filler. It may sound like a schizophrenic effort, however as a whole package the tracks complement each other perfectly. Wax Tailor has brought together his melting pot of influences to create something that is both stimulating and rewarding. Quality!

Available on Blend Corp. Records through AmpHead