A recipe that’s labelled ‘disaster’. A starter that’s prefixed by ‘non’. A kind of birth that rhymes with ‘drill’. You can take your pick, but none illustrate the notion of an uphill struggle with greater exactitude than the following mission statement:
‘The goal was to make an album that sounds and feels like the sample based hip-hop records the band love, yet capture the un-hip hop ‘band’ element of the group.’
Doesn’t bode well now does it?
New York City hip hop group Automato is Alex Frankel, Ben Fries, Jesse Levine, Nick Millhiser, Andrew Raposo and Morgan Wiley. Completed in January of 2003, their eponymously titled debut album, produced by none other than James Murphy and Tim Goldsworthy of the feverishly in demand DFA (who produced The Rapture’s ‘House Of Jealous Lovers), is a bit of a difficult beast to tame. Drawing on briefs put together by DJ Shadow and your more orthodox hoppers like Andre 3000, the tracks bring together strands of 70s funk and soul, indie-pop, leftfield electronica that wouldn’t be out of place on Warp Records and Jazz. The trouble is though, the band struggles to pull the strands together successfully, and as a consequence fails to hit any one note in particular. Not even single, ‘Walk Into The Light’ with its sleazy guitar lifts and delightful Haircut 100/Cure xylophone provides the focus or impact the album implores.
It’s not a bad hip-hop record and there’s a dazzling range of influences and details but whether it’s the fairly dry and monotonous emceeing, or whether it’s the sheer labour of it being brought together organically, it just simply isn’t as vital as one would hope.
If you going to buy into just one white hip hop band this year, I’d suggest checking out ‘Dying In Stereo’ by Northern State before parting with your well-earned spends on this.