Since We Last Spoke
On his second full-length album, the East Coast hip-hop luminary RJD2 does for vintage rock what he did for vintage funk on his auspicious debut, Dead Ringer. He cuts it up, filters it through a DJ sensibility, and rearranges it into something that's undeniably greater than the sum of its parts.
Where Dead Ringer's samples were mostly R&B-based, here Someone's Second Kiss mixes breathy vocal samples with ethereal guitar against a rock backdrop, while Exotic Talk sounds like a neighborhood garage band rehearsing in their parents' basement with a laptop and an improbably cool flute player. RJD2 hasn't abandoned R&B, though-Clean Living nimbly conceals what sounds like a guitar part from Sly & the Family Stone's Family Affair among the funk fragments, while 1976 is intriguing quasi-European disco. But just when you think you've got this hip-hop chameleon's number, he hits you with Through the Walls, its spaced-out vocal placed, karaoke-like, in a power-pop setting. With Since We Last Spoke, RJD2 continues to redefine the role of DJ as solo performer
Where Dead Ringer's samples were mostly R&B-based, here Someone's Second Kiss mixes breathy vocal samples with ethereal guitar against a rock backdrop, while Exotic Talk sounds like a neighborhood garage band rehearsing in their parents' basement with a laptop and an improbably cool flute player. RJD2 hasn't abandoned R&B, though-Clean Living nimbly conceals what sounds like a guitar part from Sly & the Family Stone's Family Affair among the funk fragments, while 1976 is intriguing quasi-European disco. But just when you think you've got this hip-hop chameleon's number, he hits you with Through the Walls, its spaced-out vocal placed, karaoke-like, in a power-pop setting. With Since We Last Spoke, RJD2 continues to redefine the role of DJ as solo performer
Tracklist
1. Since We Last Spoke
2. Exotic Talk
3. 1976
4. Ring Finger
5. Making Days Longer
6. Someone's Second Kiss
7. To All Of You
8. Clean Living
9. Iced Lightning
10. Intro
11. Through The Walls
12. One Day