As I was looking at the purchasers of Phantom Limbs on bandcamp, a certain user profile icon caught my eye and I decided to click on it. The user was Wyatt Armstrong Hunter and noticed that he had a few Cunninlynguists purchases in his collection so I figured he had great taste and decided to give a listen to the first album that appeared on his page, The Rapture: Live from Oaklandia by Zion I. This album released just a few days ago on August 7 and upon clicking on the first track I regretted missing it on release day. This is a live rap/soul album from artist Zion I who I didn't realize was already in a few tracks in my library as he did "In the City" with Cunninlynguists, and was featured on Nneka and J. Period's "God of Mercy". His features apparently didn't capture my attention before, but it certainly has gotten it now. In The Rapture the duo of Zion I focuses on unleashing riveting energy. Zumbi's voice is propelled and projected to get the listeners hype and his flow is at a steady, but quick pace. His energy and pace does start to slow down at the end however, but it's still energetic.
The live instrumentation from the band is also a main contributor to the sound. Drums, cymbals, saxophones, pianos, and guitars are present throughout the performances. There is also a nice electronic sounding instrument I don't recognize at the end of Human Being that I like a lot. It overall has a bit of a jazzy and soul flavor to it. What I like the most about the choice to go live for this album is that it really captures the feeling of being in a concert. The quality is superb and the crowd interaction really sets it home. What is also notable is that most of the tracks seem to flow into one another. In all but one song there seems to be not definite cuts from one track to the next further instilling the feeling of being at a live concert.
Now I haven't touched upon the lyrical skill of the album and I can say it's pretty decent. It's more straightforward and I didn't catch any instances of wordplay, but the themes of goals of this album seemed to be about uplifting the spirit which I typically don't see in those type of songs anyway. His style is more of the boom bap flavor. His pronunciations are clear majority of the time and the featured emcees hold up decently. The singers attached accompany the instruments well enough and none of them are bad, but none of them really stood out to me either except for that end note that Codany Holiday dropped on "Sorry". That was off the chain.
To conclude this, The Rapture: Live from Oaklandia is a great album that makes great use of live instruments and recommendation to those looking for a little more joy in their life. I'm now eager to hear more of him and I think his style would be greatly complemented to the likes of Blitz the Ambassador, Common, Akua Naru, Ben L'Oncle Soul, and Nneka. Oh yeah, I'm definitely going to listen to everything else in that user's profile.
9/10
No comments:
Post a Comment