2015 Albums of the Year: Seven Davis Jr. - Universes

[The second in my installments covering the year of 2015 in music. Peep the year-end list over at LUNA music, and read the first entry covering Bitchin' Bajas Transporteur here.]

Seven Davis. Jr. – Universes

If you know me even a little – you know I'm not (and have never been) a singles guy. I'm an album guy to the max. When I listen, it's to albums in order (with the lone exception being Amelia's iPod on shuffle on occasional car trips); whether that's on vinyl, CDs (hey, those are still a thing), digital (90% of my hard drive...), or streaming (I recommend ripping-and-uploading to Google Music rather than Spotify). So when I admit to being lured into an album by a single single, hey, that's high praise.

The single in question is "Good Vibes" by UK-via-West-Coast house-electro-funk impresario Seven Davis Jr., off his Ninja Tune debut Universes. I'd be remiss to not mention "Good Vibes" features a(n actual?) Brit, Julio Bashmore (nom de plume of producer Matt Walker) as the co-writer and lead vocal. Built on a thin drum sample (with conga!) and pitch-shifted keyboard loop, it doesn't take long to bring in the high-hat-happy house beat and funky bass. Bashmore's man-on-the-street vocal take, lax as hell (backed by cartoonish, lower-octave BGVs), makes the track, though – that and fat kick drum in the production, along with the killer breaks punctuated with wobbly synth. It begs to be blasted on, bass up, car doors and/or ass shaking.

Universes leverages the uptempo four-on-the-floor vibe with success on "Sunday Morning" and "Everybody Too Cool" – the former with a frenetic, repeated mantra that drills into your brain only to be relieved by spurts of wild, filtered keyboard soloing, while the latter laments the lack of dancing (hey, I've been in that room before) over a drum-line, loose-snare-sounding, hand-clapping beat while Davis, channeling his inner Prince, reaches for (and kills!) the occasional falsetto line over just a touch of synth/organ noodling, and a killer, if tastefully short, overdriven keyboard solo. "Mister DJ don't play this in the club / Cuz people don't dance no more / Everybody too cool for school." Not dancing to this jam would be a sin.



There's bloat here, though – the album is theoretically tied into a narrative package wherein Seven is communicating with a retro-robot-voiced computer, but these skits are so short as to be meaningless, though they do lend a George Clinton-esque vibe to the proceedings, one that Davis builds on by chameleon-ing his way through a number of stylistic changes, with varied results.

"Fighters" is the best of the (odd) bunch, a dub-specked ballad against the cult of violence and confrontation – not only a social statement, but just a damn good song, light oscillators/static providing noisy texture as Davis navigates the spacious track (that reverbed hand-clap, though!) with a soulful vocal take. After six months with this record, this may be the song I return to most. There's funk here, too, though not as 80s-shiny as Dam-Funk: "Try Me (I'll Funk You)" is as close as you'll get to a funk-battle-song, though it drags a bit on the back-end. "Be A Man" pairs an active, melodic bass-line over a speedy reggae up-beat – it's plaintive-sounding, about as yearning as a beat-forward, funky number gets.

But if too much adventurousness is Davis' vice – I'll take it. His debut is rife with earworms, melodic sensibility, and his own strange spin on future-electronic-funky-house-dub jams. Universes makes me think there are two paths forward – an ultra-refined, uber-pop record pulling from his various 70s & 80s musical heroes and mixing in modern electronic sensibilities; or a really far-out album that reaches for and achieves outer space, a record that screams indulgence. Honestly? I'd be down for both.

[This post is part of Think Kit by SmallBox. Today's prompt: Do you hear what I hear? Tell us about a sound. What do you hear in your house or at work?]

north out of the city

went to an incredibly pointless "webinar". lost some (hopefully impertinent) parts of my soul, and bulldozed some possible mental real estate. on the plus side, i had some free-writing time whilst speakerphone voices droned & duelled (and called james madison "jimmy madison").

(unedited, unrevised; much gratitude if you read till the end)


North out of the City

In my small, grey, steel car
I sit in bumper-to-bumper traffic,
watching bulldozers scoop maw-fuls
of gravel, shove it into a mound
that does not grow. Detritus rolls
in-between lanes like marbles, resting
in the narrow, brown, spit of a median.

It is the first real day of Spring,
not "Calendar Spring"--
but waking up to birds, shrugging off
your jacket in the first sign of
bright, dew-heavy warmth--and yet
my windows are down.
I'm sucking in exhaust and not even
a tree pierces my sightline of
salt-stained sedans,
overpasses tangled like veins.
The light changes briefly,
bulldozer belches into reverse,
and I slough forward with
less momentum than the gravel
still trickling off the pile.

Fuzzed-out Nigerian 60s funk,
crate-dug from moldy warehouses,
or packed and forgotten in cobwebbed rooms,
property of forgotten uncles, deceased cousins,
older brothers distant and unknown.
The guitars are fractured, sear through
shorted-out speakers. They cut swaths
out my window, above the morass of
muted humanity and chattering machines.
Drums mingle with woodblocks, metallic plinks,
clanks beaten out on spent carburetors,
tire rims, rusted oil-barrels, naked hands,
a flagellating polyrhythm of skin, steel, wood;
woven in sweat.
Voices rise and join, chanting too loud
for the cheap, overseas Sears microphone to handle.
They distort and wrap around each other.
Organs burble and levitate, wobbly till
they cascade back, swallowed by beat.

The light blinks again and I finally move.
A breeze begins, pushing the faint bead
of perspiration back into my brow.
The stereo sends lost shards of art back
into the atmosphere; lone waves
made by men who also rode in cars--
cars that tumbled down mountainsides,
were overtaken by insurrections and captured.
Worse, shot on sight, branded as heretics or
targeted by the terrible solemnity of chance.
Forgotten men existing only in forgotten,
warped grooves, box-bound under leaky roofs.
Ahead, the asphalt lies flat and straight.