During the long process of making Father Divine, Mike Ladd got married and became a father (in Paris, no less). You might be tempted to expect a calmer, more reflective Ladd in the wake of fatherhood, but you'd be way off. Father Divine is his grittiest, rawest, furthest-in-the-red album to date, leapfrogging through dub, punk, electro, and soul, all while still rooted in hip-hop. Ladd is notoriously fond of overarching concepts, and he cooked up two for Father Divine: one revolving around the title figure, the founder of the not-quite-a-cult Peace Mission Movement, the other around an attempt to recapture the saturated, dirty sound of the old ROIR punk and dub cassettes, especially that of the self-titled Bad Brains album.
The Father Divine thread seems mostly (perhaps mercifully) to have been lost along the way, apart from a mention on the outer space dub track "So 'N So", but the second goal is definitely achieved-- as synths buzz, the compression pushes the bass right up into the front of the mix and the album generally crackles with volcanic energy. Ladd has assembled a crack band that draws in players from hip-hop (Antipop Consortium's High Priest on keys), jazz (pianist and frequent collaborator Vijay Iyer), rock (TV on the Radio's Jaleel Bunton on guitar), and dub (Raz Mesinai), among other styles. The diverse musical backgrounds of the players serve Ladd's deconstructionist approach to hip-hop perfectly, as they approach every genre and song they attempt with seat-of-the-pants vitality.
Thanks to the band, the album's instrumental tracks are nearly as crucial to the album as the vocal ones, especially "Crooner Island", which opens as a stuttering dub cut, slathered in bass and broad synth strokes from French producer Gymkhana, eventually morphing into a pumping shard of Thunderdome electro. Still, the vocal tracks are the focus, and Ladd is fucking righteous on "Awful Raw", which swings violently between a repetitive bhangra chorus and blaring swirls of synth. That chorus is addictive, as Ladd doubles himself singing "Gotta get me channel on/ Gotta get my channel free/ Gotta get my channel on channel channel on" over tweaked tablas and what might be a Bollywood sample.
If there's any palpable result of Ladd's recent life changes, it's most clearly felt in a pair of tracks about women, a subject he's rarely touched upon in the past. "Barney's Girl" is a buoyant remembrance of a girl from back in the 80s in Ladd's home of Cambridge, Mass.: "She was a whole lotta punk and a little hip hop," he says, on his breeziest track to date. The other "girl" track, "Murder Girl", could be prime Prince with Ladd's falsetto chorus and splashy synth hits, channeling His Purpleness in verses broken up by an ominous bit of echoing bass that feels like a reference to Pink Floyd's "One of These Days".
Like any Ladd album, Father Divine is stuffed with tracks worth talking about, and it's nice to see that Ladd isn't afraid to lay aside his conceptual tendencies in the name of just getting down and nasty, and Father Divine does just that-- it's a record played in the red, and it's not afraid to have a good time there.
