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PasobionicEmpty Beats For Lonely Rappers Elefant Traks/Inertia It's called 'Empty Beats For Lonely Rappers' but there are no rappers on it; crazy, right? About as crazy as Pasobionic for creating this CD years after the fad for instrumental hip-hop albums, but behind the madness lurks a musical genius who has crafted what is easily the best album out of Australia so far this year. The main reason that instrumental hip-hop albums wore out was that everyone seemed to think they were the next DJ Shadow. Paso succeeds because he has crafted his own sound rather than trying to copy another's. Occupying a down-tempo space not too far removed from Shadow, Paso blends the same elements but creates a sound that is all his own; not because he adds anything particularly distinctive but because it is so hauntingly evocative. If you'd told me a month ago that an ethereal flute loop placed on top of a simple harmony provided by a plodding rubber-band guitar and a stripped back kick-snare beat interspersed with snippets of a Mexican brass band playing some sort of funeral dirge was a good idea I would have laughed at you; but it would appear that when you call this creation Empty Beat 1, it is the product of genius. There's a real skill to blending the disparate elements that exist here; not only to make cohesive tracks but to create an album with real continuity, and a large part of this continuity rests with the fact that there are no guests. Though the album definitely falls into the hip-hop category, it is to his credit that Paso has not littered the record with endless vocal samples, allowing his music to do the talking. And it does; Jay-Z once tried to make the song cry, but he should have hooked up with this cat because by the time the album closer Black Ink Concerto rolls around, it's impossible not to be moved. There's been a lot of really ugly hip-hop lately, but this is truly beautiful music.  |
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