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Concert Tue Feb 19 2008
Skyriding By Word Of Mouth
As a co-founder and pioneering member of the Anticon collective, Sole has always been a champion sprinter in the most-words-per-verse indie rap marathon. What's more, the dauntingly verbose emcee has clearly had a lot on his mind these past several years, judging from the brooding lyrical turn he's taken of late -- flipping scripts of dense, panoptic weight-of-the-worldisms that are prose-like in form and philosophical in scope. It amounts to the sound, as a certain songwriter once put it, of someone sinking in the quicksand of his own thoughts.
As demonstrated by Sole's previous album, 2005's cluttered and meandering Live From Rome, this onslaught of agon can make for an overburdened and fatiguing listening experience. But the recently released, self-titled Sole & The Skyrider Band LP manages to escape the same fate, thanks to the collaborative assistance of the erstwhile Florida-based trio Skyrider, whose arrangements lend Sole's treatises some much-needed breathing room and buoyancy.
The group's multi-instrumental contributions anchor the album in rhythmic and melodic cohesion, while Skyrider maestro Bud Berning deftly adorns the tracks with sumptuous orchestrations of loops, samples, and atmospheric production -- from the hazy and spacious dub-tinged accompaniment of "Nothing Is Free" to the lulling undertow of harp and strings that pull the listener into the depths of "Sounds Of Head On Concrete."
Sole & the Skyrider Band play the Abbey Pub this Friday evening. Anticon affiliate Telephone Jim Jesus, whose recent LP Anywhere Out Of The Everything offers a rich selection of moody and sometimes evocatively cinematic beatscapes, also performs on the bill. The Apes and Apoc open. 3420 N. Grace (at Elston). Doors open at 8pm, show starts at 9, and tickets are $12.
[mp3]: Sole & The Skyrider Band – "Shipwreckers"
[video]: Sole & The Skyrider Band – "Stupid Things Implode On Themselves"
