Plantlife - Time Traveller
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Pitchfork Media Rating: 0
The title track that opens this album is kinda funny: As a minimalistic click-track/electric piano composition murmurs away behind him, a pitched-up Mr. Wiggles/Quasimoto voice claims to have a hand in dozens of pivotal moments in rap, funk, and rock history, sort of like a more benevolent b-boy geek-out version of Sympathy for the Devil (I had Melle Mel's back when he was by the edge/ I used to wear them big suits with the Talking Heads). It's cute and all, but it's also a bit of misdirection: most of the names dropped in this track belong to hip-hop artists, yet for all the invocations of rap icons from Bambaataa to Dre to Dilla, Plantlife's Time Traveller sounds a lot more like a record informed by those artists' production influences rather than the artists themselves-- a second cousin to hip-hop, once removed. And if that cartoon spaceman voice stops short of admitting he was there when Prince decided to start wearing purple, the rest of the record spends a good deal of time proving it. If the paisley vibe hasn't hit you after reading the tracklist (Agirllikeudeservesamanwhotreatsuhowulike; Got 2 Find a Better Way; Fool for U), it probably will after the dirty-minded heavy ballad Don't Go Around Looking for a Broken Heart and the panting, guitar-driven come-on of Lovetoy (Sexy girl, I wanna be your lover boy/ Sexy girl, I wanna be your lovetoy). And if lead singer/producer Jack Splash doesn't have Prince's vocal range-- he mostly sticks to a somewhat raspy falsetto, which is engagingly dizzy enough to help you ignore how one-dimensional it is-- he definitely has the baby-I'm-a-star routine down. And judging from the darkly comic references to ego tripping and loveless sex in They Pay Me 4 This (Typqlsupastar), he knows how to subvert it as well. But on the whole the album's more in the spirit of 1999's omnivorous r&b than a full-fledged knockoff of it, and there're plenty of other familiar funk touchstones all over its DayGlo surface-- P-Funk, Zapp, the Ohio Players, Rick James-- to give it a broader personality that isn't derivative of much else aside from a certain wide-spanning era. The music on Time Traveller is a bit more postmodern and outlandish than the neo-soul production...
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