In less than a year, the Free Nationals went from playing weddings to performing on “Ellen,” opening for Beyoncé, and amping up Coachella crowds. As Anderson .Paak’s live band, they’ve been fundamental in establishing his retro sound. (As influences, they cite Snoop Dogg, Stevie Wonder, and Erykah Badu.) Now, after nearly two years of pump-faking, the band—comprised of guitarist Jose Rios, keyboardist Ron “T.Nava” Avant, bassist Kelsey Gonzales, and drummer Callum Connor— has set off on its own with a 40-minute self-titled debut. Rios has compared their new feature-heavy album to Santana’s 1999 smash hit Supernatural, and while Free Nationals isn’t as universally appealing, it shares that album’s same problems: namely, a lack of cohesion and direction.
The members of the band consider themselves “indigenous to the funk,” and they’ve gotten pretty good at mimicking the pure sound of their chosen era: They ran the album’s music through a cassette machine to add the warmth and distortion of analog compression, hoping to bake nostalgia directly into their songs. While they are all skilled players with a clear familiarity with classic grooves, their music is hampered by a lack of imagination. “I think this is the record AP [Anderson .Paak] wanted to make, but didn’t, after Malibu,” Rios told High Snobiety. But the Free Nationals debut isn’t even in the same stratosphere as .Paak’s breakthrough. The rangy soul of that album came from his distinctive storytelling and point of view, not to mention his raspy voice. Free Nationals just feels like a second-rate compilation of soul covers, a jukebox musical without a plot.
Occasionally, one of their guests catches a spark. T.I. sounds revitalized over the funk-rock riffs of “Cut Met a Break,” boosting his own legend as trap pioneer: “Number one, running up the millions/Show you how to flip a brick and buy a building.” “Oslo” adds a touch of Vocoder to what could pass for a Doobie Brothers song rewritten for Roger Troutman. Anderson .Paak makes a single appearance on the butter-smooth “Gidget,” turning an in-studio phone squabble between Rios and an ex into a story of forgotten love; it is the one song on which they feel whole.
There are plenty of collaborations here that make sense on paper, but Free Nationals doesn’t always know how to integrate the talents of its guests. Daniel Caesar (“Beauty & Essex”), Syd (“Shibuya”), Kali Uchis, and the late Mac Miller (“Time”) have all produced at least one R&B-focused opus in the last few years: the gospel-tinged Freudian, the seamlessly soulful Hive Mind, the genre-bending Isolation, or the funky Divine Feminine, respectively. But this album never manages to do more than use them as pegs on its mood board. There are isolated moments here and there, but even when when they strike an appealing note or two, the Free Nationals never come across as more than a backing band missing its leader.
