Last year's EP That Mystic was a good introduction to Kingdom, the Brooklyn producer and Night Slugs/Fool's Gold stablemate who operates in a distinct idiom you could call "BK funky." At its core, the EP fused the intricacy of post-dubstep with the production sensibility and anything-goes nature of contemporary pop. And his everything-is-percussion approach built up a sense of bustling hugeness that, speaker-rattling immediacy notwithstanding, never overwhelmed its Swiss-watch rhythmic engineering. That it did so in an intense, almost panicky sort of way was part of the appeal-- the tweaky gallop of the title track's kick-heavy rhythm was one of bass music's best last year-- but it also left a lot of options for new directions to go in the still relatively early stages of an ambitious and wide-ranging style.
Dreama plays with a few of those options, maintaining the balance between keeping his big ideas both upfront and subtly beneath the surface. The songs on this EP are largely less concerned with jostling listeners into its rhythmic space and more prone to luring them in instead, though once they get inside they can still get thrown around a bit. The organized clamor and high tension still jumps out here and there, most notably in "Stalker Ha": Its snares are crisp to the point of brittle, it teases out a water-drip piano note just long enough to make it a neat shock when the melody turns into a Halloween homage, and it builds a sharp sense of anxiety out of the way it layers half-ecstatic/half-haunted wordless soul vocals over an insistently ringing old telephone bell. It's brisk stuff, an easy highlight of a repertoire still on the upswing.
But defining Kingdom by the standards of all that taut chaos his earlier work laid down doesn't fit quite as easily with the rest of the EP. Take the title track, a cut that opens with a loping stride of a beat-- a heavy skulk ready to break out into a Rickey Henderson sprint. If you dork out for drum patterns, it's a headspinning juxtaposition of kicks, snares, claps, and snaps that's striking enough on its own. But it's not put in service of deep-pressure dynamics and a mood steeped in turmoil-- it's more like straight-up funk, with an alternately pitched-up-and-down vocal "ayyy" careening off fat synths that simultaneously evoke classic boogie and current Dirty South-indebted R&B. It's wide open and airy to the point of almost being calming, but it still thumps. "Hood by Air Theme" is a bit more tense, with foreboding atmospherics, teased-out vocal snippets, swelling bass, and floodgate-bursting percussion buildups rolled out as a blatant prelude to a big drop. But the drop itself is what makes it, and it's so audaciously deployed and timed-- and recognizably iconic in just how joyous it is-- that it'd almost feel like a spoiler just mentioning where it comes from. (It also proves that in the right hands, there's no such thing as a too-obvious sample.)
Maybe the best summary of what Kingdom's capable of can be found in the opening track. "Let You No" incorporates a comparatively lesser-known R&B track, Sadie Ama's "Fallin", to similar dramatic effect as "Hood by Air Theme". But it's a more slippery build, capitalizing on sneaking early hints of her voice under cover of the track's whistle-squeak synth and some characteristically skittery beats. We hear her first as faint echoes, then chopped up percussively, then finally breaking through as a full-fledged hook that almost reads, in this new context, like a statement on breaking tension: "I should've held back/ But I just thought I'd let you know." For all his polyrhythmic complexity and string-pulling, emotional mood-setting, Kingdom knows his way around a voice-- and that's where he's got his future down on lock. Maybe pop's future, too.
