The most technically adept instrumental hip-hop can still be boring when it loses its focus in a wash of pretty textures and fractured beats that drift by anonymously. Even big guns like Dabrye-- an obvious Eliot Lipp influence-- are sometimes guilty of misplacing their best ideas in the intricate digital corridors of their plentiful gear. Lipp's fluid electro bypasses this pratfall by using a minimal set-up-- mainly a sampler and a vintage Sequential Circuits keyboard-- to create focused, song-oriented bangers leavened with crisp, kinetic shifts. His music is sheer California, blending the Bay Area's cerebral undie-hop into the breezy, whistling G-funk of Cali's mainstream 1990s heyday. As I cast about for a valid critical approach to Lipp's sophomore LP, two distinct vectors present themselves, and the one you favor will determine your overall enjoyment of the album.
The first is purely technical. Tacoma Mockingbird's rhythmic infrastructure is clean, sharp, and eye-poppingly obvious-- Lipp has publicly stated that he's interested in breathing new life into some of the most overused breaks of all time. As if to drive the point home, he barely alters these famous breaks, usually opting to let them establish rigid skylines under the lurid sunsets of his keyboards. Even if you're bad at recognizing familiar elements when they occur in new contexts, Lipp's beats will be instantly familiar: The creeping skitter of "Tic Tac"; the elementary snares of "Times Four"; the syncopated pulse of "Mashin' on 'Em". This directness may scan as a cop-out to those of you who actually make beats, which, given the relative affordability and popularity of the technology today, is a significant contingent. Rockist equivalent: One person's hot guitar solo is another's trite reiteration of descending minor scales.
The second approach to Tacoma Mockingbird is aesthetic. This approach is most likely to find purchase with listeners who aren't seriously involved in beat-making, and in light of the rating above, it should be clear which one I favor. The question is whether artists should make music for other musicians or for fans, and while the former can produce results that captivate both sides of the technically-savvy axis, the latter often wins out with the layperson by prioritizing listenability over complexity. Limitations can be artistically fruitful-- it's more difficult to write a fresh-seeming sonnet than to create an open form-- and Lipp's elementary breaks help him to focus the thermodynamic energy of his music, imbuing it with an aura of classic familiarity.
Just look at what happens in these songs, the heirs apparent to Ratatat's accessible blend of hip-hop, rock dynamics and electro-- the vibrant colors that saturate the keys; the intricately braided strands of glossy melody and thick bass buzz that inexorably surge and glide; the nonstop onslaught of memorable hooks whipping precisely around hairpin curves. From the seasick casino-boat stutter of "Glasspipe" to the wind-rippled, neon-reflecting puddles of "Rap Tight" to the languid squelch of "Check Weight", Lipp proves that sometimes, buying shiny new rims is a better approach to reinventing old wheels than tampering with the harmony of form and function inherent in their annularity.
