Brooklyn-based Jim-E Stack grew up in a pre-gentrified San Francisco, surrounded by a variety of different cultures and sounds; after an early stint as a drummer, he started making beats in high school, and though he was turned on to house music in his late teens, you can still hear echoes of all the styles he’s loved on his debut full length, Tell Me I Belong.
Much of Stack’s reputation comes from his live sets, and his feel for mood and transitions on the first half of the album justifies his reputation as a club DJ. Tell Me I Belong has a narrative ambition not often present on electronic LPs, and Stack takes plenty of time patiently building energy for the album’s early climax, “Reassuring”. Leading up to that track, the listener is taken on a slow climb through the mid-tempo Baltimore club-influenced “Run” and “Below”'s saccharine electro. “Reassuring” is the reward at the top of the mountain, a deep house jam with a screwed-up vocal sample, plaintive R&B keys, and a dancehall shuffle. The track that follows, “Everything to Say”, is the perfect denouement, and if Tell Me I Belong were an EP consisting of these five tracks, it would be hard to find anything wrong with it.
But the second half of the album is a lesser echo of the first, up to and including its vocal-looping climax, “Without”, which, at best, stands as a mere duplicate of “Reassuring”'s charms. Other counterpoints are similarly weak: the blocky stabs at house and B-more club on “Out of Mind” feel random when compared to the precision of “Run”, and the working man's samples-n-synths package on the one-minute, “Ease Up”, while an amusing diversion, could use a little extra weight.
When the second half of Tell Me I Belong finally deviates from the established blueprint, Stack comes through with “Wake”. It’s a full-fledged, album-ending anthem that manages to combine the emotional heights of “Reassuring” and “Without” with the sure-handed patience that marks the album’s superb sequencing. Skip to any two random points within the track, and there’s a chance that they’ll make absolutely no sense in relation to one another. But in real time, these disparate moments are smoothed out by Stack’s ability to shift gears with the speed and serenity of a Formula One driver. "Wake" is a reminder of Stack's talent as a storyteller; shame, then, that the narrative of Tell Me I Belong doubles back on itself halfway through the tale.
