Apostle of Hustle is a project that Andrew Whiteman founded concomitantly with his more well-known band, Broken Social Scene, and his breathy vocals and radiant guitar style will be immediately recognizable to BSS adherents. By all accounts, Folkloric Feel is the product of Whiteman's crush on Cuban music, which he became drawn to while living for two months in Havana. A sharp, anxious intake of breath here is understandable-- culture jacking can produce laughable and even offensive results, and there's no friend you avoid with more diligence than the one who just returned from Scotland and insists on wearing a kilt to the bars.
But the much-ballyhooed Cuban flavor is subtle, a point of departure rather than a destination. Whiteman has shown admirable restraint in burying the borrowed culture deeply within the record's gliding, murky expressivity. It mainly rears its head in certain clattering polyrhythms-- which are a familiar staple of Broken Social Scene anyway-- and in the tactful use of the tres, a Cuban guitar-like instrument that looks like an overgrown mandolin, with three courses of two (or three, in the Puerto Rican variation) strings. The tres's plinking, arpeggio-friendly tone is a staple of the Apostle of Hustle sound, albeit one swathed in a surplus of Broken Social Scene-style distortion and striated atmosphere.
Besides the Cuban influence, Whiteman claims allegiance to Manu Chao, John Zorn, and "the Ancestors and Mentors"-- an apparent reference to old-time musicians and their longer attention span. A long attention span is a must for the title track, a nearly eight-minute long instrumental conversation that evolves so swiftly and complexly the listener feels rather dragged behind it like a muffler sparking on the pavement. It kicks off with a plucky, spiraling tres figure that recombines and ramifies over stark stabs of bass and rattling percussion that grows incrementally more clangorous, more Waitsian. A couple minutes in, a core melody has emerged, which is batted to and fro by call/response style organs and guitars. The evolution is so purposeful that it's difficult to pinpoint exactly when the song changes from baroque folk to a Broken Social Scene seether, and by the time it dilapidates, the poor melody has been battered through an overwhelming multiplicity of inflections and moods.
From here the album unfurls like a snapping gray flag: "Sleepwalking Ballad" is an up-tempo box step with flashes of grandeur when the melody intermittently shouts its theretofore tacit crescendo. "Baby, You're in Luck" finds Whiteman at his most Notwist, trading breathy, lovelorn lines with Amy Milan over a shuffling electro-blues track. "Gleaning" sounds of a piece with Clinic's Walking With Thee, with its gently humming organ and whispery, scatted vocals (which are pretty cool, except for one part when they get a little too forceful and begin to sound a little like the guy from Korn). And "Dark is What I Want / Strutter's Ball" is full-bore, swaggering space rock, inflected with a jazzy swing, and contains the record's only scorching guitar solo, which is impressively forceful juxtaposed with the more arcane maneuvers it nestles in.
By Whiteman's own admission, Apostle of Hustle is a sort of catchall for ideas that are too inscrutable or personal for his other projects. Folkloric Feel impresses itself on your consciousness slowly, by creeping degrees. The songs are mostly too fluid and multivalent to sum up with much fidelity; only the broadest gestures can be encapsulated, and the particulars get lost in the morass. You couldn't chart their changes and components with any more precision than you could a cloud as it moves imperturbably through the sky, and it's from this mutability that the record derives its peculiar appeal, moving in the blink of an eye from genial opacity to vivid bas-relief.
