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Dusted Reviews
Artist: Kieran Hebden & Steve Reid Album: NYC Label: Domino Review date: Dec. 5, 2008 |
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Stretched across 30 minutes of an almost continuous post-modern boogaloo, Kieran Hebden and Steve Reid’s ginned-up speak’n’spell-ectronics pay homage to New York City. There are patches of cascading squeals, growls and sirens, neatly checking off every marker of the Gotham spectrum, as well as the peripheral air of indie guitar and eastern chimes. The beat itself slows quickly and stops to mark the end of each piece, the way a subway train seems to accelerate before stopping at each station.
Our cheeks glued to the A train’s cold, glass window with the spit of sleep, we can feel Steve Reid’s drums throughout our entire body. They don’t enter through the ear or the eyes or the heart. They enter through the bone. Drilled in, relentless, faster than funk, heavier than rock, with more gravity than the Motown of Reid’s early career, the persistent beat takes breaks, but never breaks up. Reid, who now lives in Switzerland, could almost have defined New York City without Hebden’s assistance – at least the NYC that so many non-New Yorkers envision.
Reid’s rolling, sweeping, ever-present groove takes on colors and textures, courtesy of Hebden and his suite of gizmos (real or imagined), but it’s always the same hard road, the same track of tandem steel rays that cut through every borough, every station, every hall and every mind. In context of their mutual mini-career making music together (and it’s not like they haven’t both shined on their own), the work sounds almost like an epilogue, down to the intro of the last track "Departure." It begins with what sounds suspiciously like the kora that blessed so much of the duo’s African adventure from last year, Daxaar. The kora is beautiful, it’s what makes the track unique, but it’s color nonetheless, the scent of mafe and jollof rice sweetening the air as it wafts down the sidewalk of a spontaneous Little Senegal, still in Harlem, still in NYC. The tight, focused funk they call NYC.
By Andy Freivogel
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The Exchange Session Vol. 2