Tunde Olaniran, the jarringly multitalented artist from Flint, Mich., is a one-man band minus the instruments. Often described as a rapper, he's just as much a singer, and his skill in both arenas is prodigious. When he sings, he vaults between octaves, sliding from tragicomic fluttery falsetto to a luxuriant R&B tenor to a taut, imperious belt; rapping, he flips from wild Danny Brown shriek, herby Big Sean bounce, and a Father-ish benzo disaffectation. All told, Olaniran's got at least a dozen voices, and he moves between them without any sign of conscious effort—or any seeming consciousness that what he's doing is quite so wild. And this, combined with his equally startling flexibility with genre, makes Olaniran's debut album Transgressor feel like it was recorded by a dissonant, flourishing collective, rather than a man from Flint, an LGBTQ activist with a day job at Planned Parenthood, whose only vocal training is choir practice to boot.
Born to a Nigerian Christian immigrant father and an atheist, Socialist union organizer mother, Olaniran was discovered by the Berlin-based producer Phon.O off a MySpace track in 2008. He toured Europe briefly, stopping in the cities where he'd lived when his father was in the military. Since then, he's been a mainstay of and bridge between the scrappy Flint and Detroit musical scenes—he's hands-on to the point of designing costumes for his backup dancers and choreographing their routines—and his collaborators now are steadfastly local. On 2014's Yung Archetype, his under-hyped idea factory of an EP, Olaniran brought on Detroit R&B singer James Linck; Transgressor features even more Motor City, including the raucous kitsch-punk act Flint Eastwood, the cross-racial hip-hop buddy duo Passalacqua, and Invincible, a female rapper who's Jewish and queer.
His interest in genre and identity is central enough that it inspired both his album and EP titles, and he's built an experimental, leftist, theatrically artistic, streetwise pop debut, as close to Dirty Projectors as it is to Yeezus as it is to some dystopian alley-cat cabaret. His sound is pastiche reaching for synthesis, falling short when it lacks a sense of stakes. Olaniran's assets are so plentiful that he tosses them around almost forgetfully: without a clear aesthetic target, his shape-shifting can feel haphazard or unedited. But, when he is motivated by a clear sense of intention—when the disparate elements in each track stand out at right angles, subvert each other, throw each other into relief—the album glows.
This intention, like everything about Olaniran, takes wildly varying forms. He's a conscious writer, to begin with. His bouncy rap track "Diamonds", with its singsong, arch delivery and a first verse that name-checks Taco Bell, could sound like Das Racist roleplay on a careless first listen; one more time, and it's a painfully astute inhabitation of a story about the slow, mundane, systematic disenfranchisement of the American poor. His activism is out front, too, on "Everyone's Missing", a beautiful and spooky lament in which Olaniran sound like a prophet on the chorus, a radio crooner on the bridge hook, and then five different rappers on a verse that ramps up with the line "It mocks me when I'm wishful/ Grab my guts by the fistful"—"it" here being both hope and death by police—and then tosses off, "MLK was respectable/ Still gunned down in that motel."
But Olaniran's even better when he's elbowing people aesthetically rather than via commentary. There's a lot of new space ready to be claimed in R&B right now, and he's as sonically progressive as he is in verse. His punky, flamboyant, radical edge is immensely satisfying when it's got a tough, pretty melody to play against, and some of the best moments of the album come from TV on the Radio-esque, flag-waving, desperate, deeply-felt rock toplines. On the standout "Let Me Go", his generous hook unfurls down in spirals: "Once upon a time, I was yours, you were mine/ And you had me hook, line and sinker." The track's not about romance, but about Olaniran's father (who happened to give him a name that translates, remarkably, to "The spirit of the father is gone but will return again to bring back the wealth that was granted to your family.") The whole thing's tough and bombastic, as big as Funeral, as punk as hell.
Olaniran leans on melody again to great effect on "Up & Down", another song with an unexpected subject—his fluctuating weight—that distorts his harmony while spare apocalyptic trap drums build in the back. There's 808s aplenty on Transgressor; Olaniran uses a lot of what the kids are into, to occasionally flat effect. There's an exact Hudson Mohawke facsimile in the highly catchy if somewhat "Reading Rainbow"-esque single "Namesake", and at multiple points on the album, the progression is metronome-regular: there goes the trap clap, the skitter, the stomping wobbly synth. But, just as often (on the swinging, grimy "Run to the Gun" and the dance track "KYBM", for example), Olaniran uses these elements flexibly and exactly right.
Transgressor is an exceptional, aggressive, and incendiary album, in which Olaniran's idiosyncrasy feels alternately revelatory and in need of editing. He's in search of his own idiom. But when he's building—and he is building—his songs feel truly architectural: beautiful, strange structures that bomb themselves at regular intervals; rattling drives through some wild country where subversion is introduced as startling and naturally as landscape—each shift a turn around a mountain that suddenly looms.
