It often gets lost in the sauce, but the key to great style has very little to do with designers or fashion—style comes from synthesizing various influences to create an aesthetic unique to the individual. Bryndon Cook has always understood this. From his first gig as a wide-eyed college kid on the road with Solange to his work on Blood Orange’s Freetown Sound, he’s fit right in with his contemporaries on the bleeding edge where style rises above the runway. And with Starchild & the New Romantic, we’re finally getting to see his own vision take center stage.
Cook—a graduate of SUNY Purchase’s renowned acting conservatory and a former intern at Pitchfork—looks most comfortable performing, and when he’s under the big lights, it shows. It’s why Dev Hynes asks him to dance in his videos and lay down tracks for his Blood Orange project, and why Solange and Chairlift’s Patrick Wimberly trust him to bring their music to life on stage.
But while he’s been in high demand as a hired gun in the studio and on the road, it’s been a bigger challenge to refine his own voice. Cook has been releasing music as Starchild since at least 2012, but Language is his first LP. A slick, colorful foray into ’80s-influenced funk, it’s the most forceful expression of his identity on record to date, the reflection of an artist of immense talent and a strong command of musical history. Cook’s bona fides are not in question. His burden is to find himself among the genius he surrounds himself with, to communicate something original with the tools left to him by his forebears.
It’s a story as old as black music in the Americas: the blues bars injected with the energy that birthed rock and roll, the mining of old records for the samples and breaks that became hip-hop. Cook’s Language speaks to that history, both musically and spiritually. Much of Starchild’s outward expression—from the P-Funk-inspired name down to the MJ dance moves—feels like a nod to the greats. As a producer, he wields nimble guitar licks, bouncy brass, and bleating organs with equal aplomb, and appears to share Prince and Sheila E’s affection for the LinnDrum. It’s the aesthetic of someone who knows his history and aims to be included among his heroes.
On Starchild & the New Romantic’s 2016 EP Crucial, Cook departed from the synthed-out rap&B vibe of 2012’s Night Music EP, offering a glimpse of the universe he was building. Language feels even more grown, relating political struggles to his own hopes and dreams. “Hangin On” reads like a letter to the late Medgar Evers, the civil rights leader assassinated on his own driveway in front of his family. “Saw you in my sleep/Chased you ’til morning came/My mama said ‘Follow your dreams’/Well I guess you were my warning,” he sings, weighing hope against the reality of what happens to black people who stir the pot. The song’s video elicits specific images of the Student Non-Violent Coordinating Committee, itself created to bridge the generation gap between Martin Luther King’s Southern Christian Leadership Conference and the young students who represented the future of the civil rights movement.
Much of Language is written with one person in mind, a relationship strained—and ultimately ended—by the distance that comes with the life of a touring artist. This narrative is evident if you’re looking for it, but taken as a whole the lyrics read as those of an author working out his own emotional vocabulary, a young lover learning how to love and put those feelings into words.
The project’s visuals carry a stylish retro-futurist vibe (old landline phones, ’80s street-style chic) that reflects Cook’s attempt to straddle multiple generations, connecting past and present with an eye towards the future. The title track distills the concept succinctly, with a bouncy guitar riff, soulful harmonies, and an electric wail on the bridge that Cook says he imagined as Morris Day doing “Uptown Funk.” He’s an equally skilled singer and MC—his closest rapping analogue is the smooth swagger of Theophilus London—as evidenced by the blistering bars of “Some People I Know”: “Been up in the gazebo, building up my machismo/Stick me out in the doghouse, couldn’t even speak to the people.”
For an artist so adept at incorporating his influences, it’s appropriate that the song on Language that makes Cook’s gifts most evident was actually written by someone else. “Mood” is ostensibly a cover of the Porches song, but it completely reimagines the composition with a smoldering bass-driven atmosphere that wouldn’t have sounded out of place on Freetown Sound. It’s instructive to hear the two versions played back-to-back; Greta Kline’s bass gives the original some bounce, but in Cook’s hands, the sketch is fully fleshed out, injected with a funky, soulful energy that completely transforms the song.
It’s often through their dialogue with standards that the most distinguished artists are able to find themselves, filtering the things they love through their own unique perspective. The language Starchild uses to express his point of view is still evolving. But with each new entry into his catalog, streaks of brilliance shine through, illuminating a portrait of an artist who deserves a seat at the table.
