Daily Music Reviews (Summer Challenge)

[rayword45]

Day 41: Donuts by J Dilla (Album Choice: Lord of Sushi)

For the last album of this streak, I went with an instrumental hip-hop album. Sort of cheating but whatever. J Dilla was a hip-hop producer and rapper who was (according to many) fairly influential on hip-hop production. He died in 2006 of Thrombotic thrombocytopenic purpura (a blood disease). This was his last album, released 3 days before his death, recorded mostly in a hospital using a sampler and stack of records. I'll be doing at least a brief comparison to Nujabes, since they're always compared for having the exact same birthday, making very good beats and being dead. And on a bright note, I recently upgraded from two dollar headphones to five dollar ones! Now, onto the music.

Only one track is above 2 minutes, but there are 31 tracks. That's a lot of beats. But such short lengths are probably a good idea. Such a rapid-fire approach allows him to get a lot of ideas through the course of an average-length album, and never does the album feel draining (at least not, holy crap, I'm already 11 tracks in?) partly thanks to the short length of each song. Had these songs been extended unnecessarily (or to make them the length of an average rap song) they might have felt repetitive. Instead, each track feels like a piece of a large suite, and while I wouldn't say the tracks flow perfectly into each other they do compliment each other well. The main flaw in such an approach is that I believe I'll need to listen to this more than once to fully wrap my head around this album, but that's okay. If anything I'll say my first thoughts and go back to it again (is that cheating?). On the beats themselves, for the most part they're heavily sample-based (duh) and that's done very well especially considering the limitations of the recording process. Throughout the entire album you can often hear the crackle of vinyl, reminding you of the recording set-up consisting mainly of vinyl records (and a sampler). And the samples themselves are mixed very well, sometimes left basically untouched, other times chopped and screwed so much they're completely unrecognizable (not that I know many of the records being sampled here). I'm also fond of the fact that it begins on Donuts (Outro) and begins on Donuts (Intro). Gives it a book close-and-open feeling (since they contain the same sample at the end/entire track) and gives me a reason to listen to it on loop, which is something I feel I should do soon.

Obligatory comparison to Nujabes that I promised. This guy is a lot less jazz-based and his slapdash approach is different from the instrumentals on Metaphorical Music which were considerably less energetic and more instrument-based rather than samples. Whereas Nujabes gave me a lounge-y, chillout feeling these beats seem more energetic, more party-like. Overall I'm drifting towards Nujabes but like I said, I want to give this album more time so I can fully wrap my head around this. This is an album that is begging for multiple listens.

So, yeah, I liked this album, quite a bit. However, the approach to tracks here means there's a lot to wrap your head around in such a short time, almost like an aural overload. The whole thing seems like a suite almost, as if it's begging to be listened to in one sitting. I wouldn't mind if this was released as one long 45 minute track (similar to Lysol by the Melvins or Delirium Cordia by Fantomas) because I'm pretty sure this album is meant to be listened to in such a way. Then again, I could be wrong considering individual beats were re-used later on. Either way, I'll give this a recommendation and sooner or later I'll come back to this and see how my opinion changes over several listens.