When albums are meant to happen, something palpable radiates from the tracks. Energy is delivered because it has no other place else to go, and the ensuing sense of release transcends genre: It's as true for Three Feet High and Rising and The Blueprint as it is for The Velvet Underground & Nico and Marquee Moon.
Connected-- the 2003 collaboration between then little-known North Carolina MC Phonte Coleman and a Dutch producer named Nicolay-- felt like that. The two met through an Okayplayer message board. Though they had never spoken, Nicolay and Phonte managed an online-only collaboration as Foreign Exchange that crossed platforms and topics with ease, blending Nicolay's kaleidoscopic production with Phonte's characteristically self-effacing and trenchant lyrics. Phonte followed rhapsodies of love gone wrong with lambastes of welfare policy; Nicolay's terrific beats made the tracks seamless, timely, nearly perfect.
But Here, Nicolay's proper debut-- three years and beats on two-dozen other albums later-- suggests none of that urgency. Instead, it sounds like a predictable album of grooves from a capable producer copping verses and hooks from substandard friends.
Coleman appears, for instance, only by way of intro to Here's first proper track, "I Love the Way You Love Me". He quips, "Let's go" before Nicolay's beat drops and Justus League affiliate Darien Brockington eases in on a bed of multi-tracked, new soul vocals. Just 10 seconds into the first verse, one of Here's two critical quandaries is apparent: "I love the way you make me feel when I'm here with you (You make me feel special)/ Laying next to you, kissing you, touching you/ Wanting you, loving you, over and over again," sings Brockington, soft-stepping over Nicolay's modal bassline like a debutante glad to be walking in shoes so pretty. Brockington seems too intimated to deliver anything beyond pleasantries, too busy finessing his clichés to say something he believes. It epitomizes his experience chiefly as a hookman, and Nicolay's choice to drop Brockington's first major solo spot immediately after the intro is a doormat to an album of banality.
St. Louis rapper Black Spade's "I Am the Man" immediately hops on the underground superiority/master-of-mic tip. "Your skills are rented/ It's time to give them back to AVIS," he spits in the first verse, ignoring the notion that Nicolay's blissful, horn-heavy boom-bap is an open invitation to descend from the high horse of hackneyed beef. It's a jarring effect, especially on the heels of Brockington's r&b beam, and such flightiness is the disc's second fault. Such lack of cohesion creates a seam, the kind of fabric split that subdivides almost every bit of momentum Here ever finds.
Given Spade's spot on three of the album's 11 tracks, he and Nicolay are both culpable. Together, they seem unaware of the need for focus. YahZarah's siren song on "Adore" is marred by Spade's preceding ego stroking. Sure, his delivery-- a heavy swagger that swings hard, fast and sometimes playful-- is solid enough, but lyrically he lobs the same subterranean softballs. Amid references to the "hustle and flow" of hip-hop and the major-label-as-pimp metaphorical malaise, he even manages to unearth the 2004 time capsule, "I'm Sick James, bitch, not Rick James, bitch."
Still, Here's failure actually hurts because, as a producer, Nicolay continues to warrant major notice, though his work now comes botched by deference to mediocrity. Nicolay shifts between verse and chorus and back again flawlessly, accomplishing a lot by tampering with very little, perhaps by adding only a step or sound per measure. At their best, those beats are selfless beauty, their simple austerity handing steady reins to a group of performers that clearly aren't ready.
